How Napoleon Destroyed the Old World Order | A Bedtime History Documentary

0:01 It is [music] December 2nd, 1804.

0:04 Inside the freezing walls of Notre Dame Cathedral,

0:08 a 35-year-old artillery officer from Corsica takes a crown from the hands

0:13 of the Pope himself [music] and places it on his own head.

0:18 In a single motion, he ends [music] the revolution

0:21 that made him and alters the fate of Europe forever.

0:27 Tonight, [music] we unravel the life of Napoleon Bonaparte.

0:31 He is perhaps the most debated [music] figure in modern history.

0:35 A military genius who won 60 [music] battles

0:39 and rewrote the legal codes of an entire continent.

0:43 Yet the empire he built was paid for in blood.

0:46 An estimated [music] 3 to 6 million dead from Madrid

0:50 to Moscow in campaigns fought to satisfy one man's [music]

0:55 limitless hunger for glory.

0:58 In tonight's episode, we'll trace Napoleon's [music] extraordinary rise

1:03 from a debt-ridden family on the fringes of Europe

1:05 to the throne of the largest empire the continent [music] had seen since Rome.

1:10 We'll see how the wars he unleashed destroyed the old feudal order,

1:15 redrew the borders of nations,

1:18 and spread the dangerous idea that people could choose their own rulers.

1:23 And finally, [music] we'll reckon

1:25 with the question that still haunts historians.

1:29 Did he carry the revolution forward or did he betray it?

1:34 Before we begin, please take a moment to like [music] and subscribe.

1:39 It really helps us fight against algorithmic censorship.

1:44 And let us [music] know in the comments

1:46 which topics you'd like us to explore next.

1:50 Now, settle in as we journey back to a wild,

1:54 rain-lashed island in the Mediterranean where a restless boy is

1:58 about to begin the most [music] extraordinary ascent in modern history.

2:04 This [music] is the bedtime biography of Napoleon Bonaparte.

2:17 Chapter 1, The Outsider's Ascent.

2:23 The island of Corsica was a peculiar place.

2:27 It had never been fully independent nor fully absorbed into any empire.

2:34 The people there lived much as they had for centuries,

2:37 subsisting on chestnuts, cheese, onions, fruit,

2:41 and the occasional piece of goat or pork, all of it washed down with local wine.

2:47 Even the bread was made from chestnuts.

2:50 Wealth differentials were narrow, the society pre-feudal in its structure,

2:56 and yet every family carried a fierce sense of pride and dignity.

3:01 You didn't cross a Corsican household lightly.

3:04 Any act of violence could trigger a vendetta from which there was almost

3:07 no escape because nothing stayed secret for long in such a restricted space.

3:14 It was into this world

3:16 that the Bonaparte family had settled generations earlier.

3:20 Their lineage traced back to minor gentry from Tuscany and Liguria,

3:24 and they'd eventually put down roots in Ajaccio.

3:28 The family home had been carved up over the years by successive dowries,

3:33 leaving seven members crammed into roughly 40 dilapidated square meters.

3:38 In the summer of 1764,

3:41 the 18-year-old Carlo Bonaparte married 14-year-old Letizia Ramolino.

3:47 The match came with a dowry that boosted Carlo's social standing.

3:52 Letizia was beautiful, strong-willed, and strict with her children.

3:57 She administered slaps freely and without hesitation.

4:01 It was a tough household.

4:05 Meanwhile, Corsica was in the grip of something larger.

4:09 Pasquale Paoli had proclaimed a Corsican Republic back in 1755,

4:15 governing from the hill town of Corte.

4:18 He'd established a constitution, institutions, even a university.

4:24 But France could not tolerate a utopian republic sitting on its doorstep.

4:29 Following the Treaty of Versailles in 1768, French troops moved in.

4:35 The decisive engagement came at Ponte Novu in May of 1769.

4:41 The Corsican forces were routed.

4:44 Paoli fled over the mountains and into exile in England.

4:50 Carlo Bonaparte submitted to the new

4:52 French authorities and turned back towards Ajaccio.

4:56 On the journey home, crossing the mountains,

4:59 Letizia's mule stumbled while fording the river Liamone.

5:03 She nearly lost the child she was carrying.

5:06 That child was born on the night of the 15th of August,

5:11 1769, and named Napoleon after his great uncle.

5:16 The French military governor, the Comte de Marbeuf,

5:20 needed loyal supporters among the local notables,

5:23 and the Bonaparte family fit the role.

5:26 Marbeuf became a frequent visitor to the household,

5:29 so frequent that his closeness to Letizia fueled

5:32 local gossip about the paternity of her next child.

5:38 Napoleon spent a happy early childhood playing

5:41 in the streets of Ajaccio with his cousins,

5:44 summering up in the hills at Bocognano.

5:47 His mother would later recall that of all her children,

5:49 he'd been the most intrepid, aggressive, quarrelsome, always pushing.

5:55 But the French suppression of Corsican resistance left its marks on the boy.

6:00 Mobile columns burned crops across the countryside

6:04 and hanged corpses along public highways as warnings.

6:08 These were the sights of his youth.

6:13 Carlo eventually secured a royal bursary

6:15 for Napoleon at the military academy of Brienne.

6:18 The application required proving both noble credentials and indigence.

6:24 The boy arrived at the austere institution run

6:27 by the Order of Minims on the 15th of May, 1779.

6:33 He was puny, olive-complexioned, and spoke poor French,

6:38 all of which marked him immediately as a foreigner and an easy target.

6:43 He read constantly.

6:45 He fenced off a small allotment of land for himself, a place to be alone.

6:51 There's something about that image, a boy alone with his books,

6:56 trying to piece [music] together the entire world from what he could read.

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8:01 The school librarian noted that Napoleon courted solitude

8:05 as though it were the thing he valued most.

8:08 One fellow pupil remembered him as gloomy and fierce to excess,

8:13 almost always by himself, never sharing in the noisy mirth of his schoolmates.

8:20 The curriculum at Brienne centered

8:22 on the heroes of antiquity, Plutarch primarily,

8:26 and was designed to awaken instincts of chivalry, honor, duty, sacrifice.

8:34 When provoked, Napoleon responded with a ferocity born of contempt.

8:39 He moved on to the École Militaire in Paris in October of 1784,

8:45 where the atmosphere was more aristocratic and the presence of wealthy,

8:49 fee-paying cadets only deepened his alienation.

8:53 He hated drill.

8:55 During one session, he hurled his musket at the drill master in a rage.

9:00 He loved fencing, but fought so aggressively

9:02 that he'd lay himself open to touches constantly, breaking foil after foil.

9:08 He groaned at the frivolity of the other pupils.

9:12 When his father died of stomach cancer in February 1785,

9:17 the weight of the family landed squarely on his shoulders.

9:23 Commissioned as a second lieutenant in the artillery regiment of La Fère,

9:27 Napoleon was stationed in Valence by November of that year.

9:31 He read voraciously, history, geography, philosophy,

9:36 and fell heavily under the influence of Rousseau.

9:39 He wrote a short essay on suicide, asking, "Since I must die one day,

9:45 would it not be as well to kill myself?"

9:49 He described himself as always alone while surrounded by people,

9:53 preferring to sit with his own melancholy.

9:56 During long leaves of absence, he spent 21 months back in Corsica managing

10:02 the family's dwindling finances and a failing mulberry nursery.

10:06 He adopted the pose of the persecuted patriot writing a history

10:10 of the island that cast the French as barbarous occupiers.

10:15 "I was born as the fatherland was perishing." He wrote to Paoli describing how

10:21 the screams of the dying and the tears of despair had surrounded his cradle.

10:29 The outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789 found him stationed in Auxonne.

10:35 Riots broke out.

10:37 He marshaled troops against the crowds but expressed a deep distaste

10:41 for the mob complaining that he'd been prevented from firing on them.

10:46 He returned to Corsica where he and his brother Joseph threw

10:50 themselves into local politics distributing tricolor

10:54 cockades and forming a citizen's militia.

10:57 But Paoli had returned from exile and the old

11:00 leader viewed the Bonaparte brothers with suspicion.

11:04 Napoleon secured a command in the Ajaccio

11:07 National Guard through intimidation going

11:09 so far as to kidnap a voting commissioner to swing the election.

11:14 Tensions boiled over on the 8th of April 1792 when

11:20 his volunteers fired on townsfolk and attempted to seize the citadel.

11:27 Denounced by Paoli's supporters and facing assassination,

11:31 Napoleon slipped out of Ajaccio by boat.

11:34 In his absence, Paoli's partisans sacked the family home.

11:40 Letizia gathered the children and fled into the hills.

11:44 A French naval squadron eventually evacuated them and in June of 1793,

11:51 the Bonaparte family sailed for the mainland as destitute refugees.

11:57 The rupture with Corsica was total.

11:59 The young artillery officer who had dreamed of liberating

12:02 his island now had nothing to go back to.

12:06 What he had instead was a commission in the French army,

12:09 a large family to feed and a republic tearing itself apart around him.

12:20 Chapter 2 The Jacobin General The Bonaparte family washed ashore in Toulon

12:28 during the summer of 1793 into a city that had lost its mind.

12:35 Jacobin mobs roamed the streets hanging wealthy citizens from lamp

12:39 posts and beating others to death in broad daylight.

12:42 It was no place for a destitute family with young children.

12:46 Letizia gathered them up and moved to the nearby

12:49 village of La Valette where things were quieter, where they could breathe.

12:55 Napoleon, meanwhile, rejoined his regiment in Nice and collected his back pay

13:01 sending what he could to keep his mother and siblings fed.

13:05 He also dashed off a political pamphlet called Le Souper de Beaucaire,

13:11 a pointed defense of the Jacobin government that served a second

13:15 purpose distancing the family name

13:17 from Paoli and any whiff of counter-revolution.

13:23 It wasn't long before Toulon made headlines again.

13:26 Royalist insurgents had seized the city and handed it,

13:30 along with the entire French Mediterranean Fleet,

13:33 over to the British Royal Navy.

13:36 The Republic dispatched an army of raw recruits to take it back.

13:40 Led by General Carteaux, a painter by trade with about as much

13:45 military experience as you'd expect from one.

13:48 The besieging artillery needed a commander after the previous one took

13:52 a wound and the Corsican deputy Saliceti knew just who to call.

13:57 Napoleon arrived and sized up the situation fast.

14:02 The key was a promontory overlooking the outer harbor.

14:07 Take that and the British ships would have no choice but to pull out.

14:13 His superiors didn't see it that way but Napoleon had stopped listening to them.

14:18 He stripped surrounding posts of cannons,

14:21 powder and horses building up an artillery park from almost nothing.

14:26 He set up foundries to cast cannonballs.

14:29 He trained infantrymen to serve as gunners.

14:33 At night, he slept on the ground beside his batteries wrapped

14:37 in his cloak close enough to feel the heat of the barrels.

14:42 General Doppet, observing from a comfortable distance,

14:45 noted that the young officer combined a rare

14:48 bravery and indefatigable energy with considerable talent.

14:54 The final assault on Fort Mulgrave came

14:56 on the 17th of December in a torrential rainstorm.

15:00 Napoleon led from the front.

15:02 His horse was shot out from under him

15:06 and an English corporal drove a lance into his leg.

15:09 He kept going.

15:11 Once the fort was taken, he turned its guns on the British

15:14 ships and fired red-hot cannonballs into the harbor.

15:19 Two vessels exploded.

15:22 The British evacuated taking French royalists with them

15:26 and the Republican troops who flooded back

15:28 into Toulon carried out reprisals that were

15:30 savage even by the standards of the terror.

15:35 At 24, Napoleon was promoted to brigadier general.

15:39 His comrades took notice.

15:42 Claude Victor described him as small in stature but well-proportioned,

15:47 thin and puny in appearance but taut and strong

15:50 with eyes that seemed to send out shafts of fire.

15:54 The young general, exhausted and suffering

15:57 from scabies he'd picked up during the siege,

15:59 accepted a quieter posting as inspector of coastal defenses.

16:03 He needed the rest.

16:07 It didn't last.

16:08 When Robespierre fell, Napoleon's name was on the list.

16:12 He spent 11 days under house arrest before being cleared and let go.

16:17 He drifted to Marseille where his brother Joseph had

16:20 done well for himself and there he met Désirée Clary, a modest 16-year-old.

16:27 They became engaged.

16:29 His letters to her read less like love notes and more like homework assignments,

16:35 advice on what to read, how to practice her music.

16:41 Ordered to the Army of the West to fight insurgents in the Vendée,

16:45 Napoleon did what he could to avoid it.

16:47 He traveled to Paris,

16:49 obtained sick leave and plunged into the hedonistic society of the capital.

16:54 Wealthy women wore flesh-colored pantaloons and dresses of transparent gauze.

16:59 Napoleon, with his unkempt hair and clumsy French,

17:02 fit in about as well as a stray dog at a dinner party.

17:06 The wife of his friend Barras described him as cold,

17:10 somber and little short of savage.

17:15 Feeling thoroughly out of place,

17:17 he channeled his gloom into a novella, Clisson et Eugénie,

17:21 about a misunderstood military genius who flees society,

17:26 finds love with a pure young woman and dies heroically.

17:31 Around the same time,

17:32 the War Ministry struck him off the list of artillery generals.

17:36 He was put on half pay.

17:37 He wrote to Joseph that he was very little attached to life.

17:41 He floated the idea of throwing himself under a passing carriage.

17:48 Then came October 1795 and with it a lifeline.

17:54 Royalist sections of Paris rose against the government

17:58 and the politician Paul Barras needed someone who could act fast.

18:03 He appointed Napoleon as his second-in-command to defend the Tuileries.

18:08 Napoleon sent a young cavalry officer

18:11 named Joachim Murat galloping across the city

18:14 to secure 40 cannons from the Sablon plain just ahead of the rebels.

18:20 The guns were placed at key intersections and then he waited.

18:26 When the 20,000-strong rebel force advanced,

18:29 Napoleon's artillery fired canister shot directly into their ranks.

18:34 The insurrection was over within 2 hours.

18:38 He was promoted to divisional general and given command of the Army

18:42 of the Interior which meant control of the capital's police and National Guard.

18:48 He rode through the streets flanked by mustachioed

18:51 officers projecting a new and very deliberate authority.

18:57 It was around this time that a 14-year-old boy

19:00 came to ask permission to keep his executed father's sword.

19:05 Napoleon granted it.

19:07 The boy's mother arrived shortly after to give her thanks.

19:11 Her name was Josephine de Beauharnais.

19:15 She was 32, a widow of legendary charm who had learned

19:19 to smile without opening her mouth on account of her teeth.

19:23 She lived on the generosity of her lovers

19:26 and needed a husband to secure her future.

19:29 Barras, her current patron, encouraged the match partly to settle a young

19:34 general who was becoming harder to manage.

19:39 Napoleon fell hard.

19:41 He wrote letters declaring that her kisses set his blood on fire.

19:45 Josephine was cooler about it.

19:47 She confided to a friend that she found

19:50 his violent love resembling an excess of madness.

19:54 Both parties forged their documents before signing the marriage contract.

19:58 He added a couple of years, she shaved a few off.

20:02 The civil ceremony happened late at night, conducted by a minor functionary.

20:07 On the wedding night, Josephine's pet pug, Fortuné,

20:12 bit Napoleon in the calf as he climbed into bed.

20:17 Two days later, he was gone.

20:20 He left Paris to take command of the army of Italy,

20:23 rattling south in his carriage as fast as the horses could carry him.

20:28 "Every instant takes me further away from you,

20:31 my adorable love." He wrote from somewhere along the road.

20:35 "And with every instant, I find less and less strength with which

20:39 to bear being away from you." Ahead of him,

20:42 on the Italian border, thousands of soldiers waited without boots,

20:46 without pay, and without much reason to follow anyone.

20:50 That was about to change.

20:56 Chapter 3 The Warlord of Italy and Egypt He arrived

21:04 at the headquarters of the army of Italy in March of 1796,

21:07 26 years old and looking every bit the outsider.

21:11 The veteran commanders waiting for him were unimpressed.

21:15 They saw a small, awkward young man with a rasping voice

21:19 and a political appointment he hadn't earned on any battlefield they recognized.

21:24 The army itself was in a terrible state.

21:28 40,000 soldiers, starving and mutinous,

21:32 many of them wearing woven straw where boots should have been.

21:36 Bonaparte didn't ease himself in.

21:38 He secured emergency funds,

21:41 put fresh meat in front of the men, and demanded obedience.

21:47 Then he moved, and he moved fast.

21:50 He launched his forces through the mountains,

21:53 driving a wedge between the Austrian

21:54 and Sardinian armies before either could react.

21:58 The French fought without tents or regular supply lines,

22:02 living entirely off the land as they advanced.

22:05 The Sardinians were intimidated into an armistice

22:08 and forced out of the war altogether.

22:11 Bonaparte then outflanked the retreating Austrians

22:14 by crossing the River Po at Piacenza, pushing deep behind their lines.

22:20 It was ruthless, improvisational, and it worked.

22:25 At the town of Lodi, the French advance guard found the wooden bridge

22:29 over the River Adda defended by Austrian cannon.

22:32 Bonaparte ordered a frontal assault.

22:34 The first men who surged forward were cut apart by canister shot.

22:40 Subsequent waves, led by senior officers who

22:42 showed complete disregard for their own lives,

22:45 managed to cross and dislodge the defenders.

22:49 It was a skirmish, really,

22:51 but Bonaparte exaggerated the scale of it in his reports

22:55 and commissioned prints showing himself brandishing a standard amid the gunfire.

23:01 He was learning something important about war,

23:03 which was that the story you told afterwards

23:06 mattered almost as much as the fight itself.

23:11 Lodi changed something in him.

23:13 He later reflected that it was only after that battle that it

23:16 struck him he might become a major actor on the political scene.

23:21 He rode into Milan on a white horse under arches of foliage,

23:25 greeted by Italian nationalists who saw him as a liberator.

23:30 Behind the pageantry, he stripped the conquered territories of cash,

23:34 silver plate, and masterpieces of art, shipping it all back to Paris.

23:40 That was how he funded the struggling Directory

23:43 while quietly building a power base of his own.

23:48 The Austrians weren't finished.

23:49 They launched counteroffensive after counteroffensive

23:53 to relieve their besieged fortress at Mantua.

23:56 Bonaparte defeated each one through rapid maneuver,

23:59 marching his men to exhaustion across the theater of war.

24:03 At Arcole, he tried to lead a charge across a heavily defended bridge.

24:08 His men refused to follow.

24:11 He ended up in a muddy drainage ditch, dragged to safety under enemy fire.

24:16 The propaganda prints that followed, naturally,

24:19 showed him storming the bridge like a hero.

24:23 After the decisive victory at Rivoli and the fall of Mantua,

24:27 he marched on Vienna.

24:29 Without consulting the Directory, he dictated the Treaty of Campo Formio,

24:34 carving up the map of Europe on his own authority.

24:38 He partitioned the neutral Republic of Venice,

24:42 handing territory to Austria in exchange

24:45 for French control of Belgium and the Rhineland.

24:49 Paris was furious at his insubordination,

24:52 but the peace was popular and there was nothing they could do about it.

24:58 Back in France, he kept a low profile for a time.

25:02 He wore civilian clothes,

25:04 attended meetings of the Institute of Arts and Sciences.

25:08 He was already thinking about his next move.

25:11 A direct invasion of Britain was impossible

25:14 given the weakness of the French navy,

25:16 so he proposed something far more ambitious, an expedition to Egypt.

25:22 The idea was to establish a colony, cut British access to India,

25:26 and eventually pierce the Isthmus of Suez with a canal.

25:30 The Directory approved,

25:32 happy enough to send their most dangerous general somewhere far away.

25:38 The armada captured Malta on its way and landed near Alexandria in July of 1798.

25:46 What followed was brutal.

25:48 The troops marched across scorching desert without water bottles.

25:53 Men collapsed from dehydration and dysentery.

25:57 Stragglers were killed by Mameluke horsemen.

26:00 Some soldiers, delirious and despairing, took their own lives in the sand.

26:06 At the Battle of the Pyramids, though,

26:08 the French infantry formed disciplined squares and tore apart

26:13 the Mameluke cavalry charges with volley after volley of musket fire.

26:18 Bonaparte entered Cairo and began organizing the country,

26:22 setting up hospitals, street lighting, a new administration.

26:26 A scientific commission investigated ancient ruins and Nile water purification.

26:32 For a brief moment, it looked like a colony might actually take shape.

26:38 Then Admiral Nelson found the French fleet

26:41 anchored at Aboukir Bay and annihilated it.

26:45 The army was trapped.

26:47 An uprising in Cairo saw French soldiers massacred

26:51 before being ruthlessly suppressed with artillery and beheadings.

26:56 Bonaparte marched into Syria to confront an approaching Ottoman force.

27:01 At Jaffa, his troops sacked the town.

27:04 He ordered the execution of up to 2,000 prisoners of war

27:08 on the beach because he had no food to spare for them.

27:11 Bubonic plague struck the army.

27:14 The siege of Acre failed, thwarted by Ottoman defenses and British naval guns.

27:20 The retreat back to Egypt was a horror of abandoned, wounded,

27:24 and dying men administered fatal doses of laudanum on Bonaparte's orders.

27:31 He won one last battle,

27:33 annihilating a seaborn Ottoman force at the land battle of Aboukir,

27:38 and driving thousands of Turks into the sea.

27:41 But word had reached him of French military defeats

27:45 in Europe and a government teetering on the edge of collapse.

27:49 He made his decision quickly.

27:51 He left the army under General Kléber,

27:54 boarded a frigate in secret with a handful of officers,

27:57 and slipped through the British blockade.

28:00 The soldiers he left behind would remain stranded in the Egyptian desert.

28:05 Bonaparte was already gone, sailing for France,

28:09 where a fragile and failing republic waited for someone to take hold of it.

28:19 Chapter 4 The Imperial Machine

28:24 As the bleary-eyed representatives of the people made

28:27 their way down still-dark streets on the morning of the 9th of November,

28:32 1799, soldiers were already taking up positions around the Tuileries.

28:38 Dragoons under Sebastiani, chasseurs under Murat.

28:43 The system they were meant to be

28:44 protecting had already collapsed under its own weight.

28:48 The Directory, that five-headed government born of revolution,

28:53 functioned as a hollow shell.

28:56 Hyperinflation had wiped out ordinary savings.

29:01 Army contractors and war profiteers

29:04 built enormous fortunes off perpetual conflict.

29:08 And a newly wealthy class of property

29:10 owners was actively looking for a strongman,

29:13 someone who could lock in their gains and crush

29:15 any threat from the left or the right.

29:19 Napoleon simply walked through a door that had been left wide open.

29:26 Once the members of the Council of Elders

29:28 had donned their togas and taken their seats,

29:31 they were informed of a sinister plot

29:34 by infamous brigands to bring down the government.

29:38 The assemblies were in grave danger, apparently,

29:40 and must transfer immediately to the former

29:43 royal palace of Saint-Cloud outside Paris.

29:46 To safeguard the move,

29:48 they were told the hero of Egypt would take command of all troops in the region.

29:54 Napoleon emerged from his study, read the decree aloud,

29:58 called on those present to help him save the Republic,

30:01 and then mounted a magnificent black Andalusian lent to him by Admiral Bruer.

30:07 He set off for the Tuileries escorted by cavalry

30:11 and a suite of generals in brilliant uniforms,

30:13 cheered along the way by onlookers who had no idea what was actually happening.

30:20 At about 10:00, he entered the chamber of the elders,

30:23 flanked by Berthier and a handful of generals,

30:26 and gave a rehearsed speech praising them for their wisdom.

30:31 Then he went outside, climbed back onto the black horse,

30:35 which he was having some difficulty mastering,

30:38 and made the rounds of the assembled units,

30:40 exciting their enthusiasm with dramatic statements empty of substance.

30:46 His agitation had brought out a severe rash on his face.

30:51 While considering his next move, he scratched so hard he drew blood,

30:56 which only seemed to confirm the rumor already flying

30:59 through the ranks that he'd been attacked with daggers.

31:02 The story reached the crowd, and eventually all the way to Paris.

31:09 Inside the Council of 500, things were falling apart.

31:14 His brother Lucien had done what he could to calm the shouting,

31:18 but eventually made a histrionic gesture,

31:21 removing his toga, his cap, untying his gold-fringed sash,

31:27 and laying them down as a sign that liberty had been silenced.

31:31 He ordered a captain to take 10 grenadiers and rescue him from the chamber.

31:37 Then, in a piece of theater that would

31:40 have been absurd if it weren't so effective,

31:43 Lucien took a sword from an officer, put the point to his brother's breast,

31:48 and solemnly swore he would kill Napoleon himself if he

31:53 ever raised a finger against the liberty of the French people.

31:57 As the drum beat the charge and crashed into the orangery,

32:00 some of the 500 climbed onto their benches

32:03 and began swearing to defend the Republic.

32:06 Others followed the spectators out through the conveniently low windows.

32:11 Murat marched toward the podium and declared the assembly dissolved.

32:15 Then, turning to his soldiers, he put it plainly,

32:20 "Chuck this lot out of here." The next morning was a decadi,

32:26 a Republican Sunday.

32:29 At 10:00, citizen Consul Bonaparte left home in civilian dress and was driven

32:34 through empty streets to the Luxembourg in a carriage escorted by six dragoons.

32:40 He went directly to Sieyès's apartment,

32:43 where the two of them talked for over an hour.

32:45 The first thing to be settled was

32:47 who would preside over the new three-man consulate.

32:51 According to one version, Ducos simply turned to Napoleon and said,

32:55 "It is quite unnecessary to vote on the presidency.

32:58 It is yours by right." After Napoleon left the room,

33:02 Sieyès reportedly told the others, "Gentlemen, you have a master.

33:06 He wants to do everything, knows how to do everything,

33:10 and can do everything." Napoleon moved from the Rue

33:15 de la Victoire to the seat of power,

33:17 establishing himself in rooms on the ground floor of the Petit Luxembourg,

33:22 while Josephine made herself at home on the floor above,

33:25 and then he set to work.

33:27 On the 13th of December,

33:29 a 10-liter measuring jar was placed on the table in lieu of an urn,

33:34 and the 50 members of two commissions wrote out their choices on slips of paper.

33:39 Before the votes could be counted, Napoleon,

33:42 who'd been leaning on the mantelpiece warming his legs by the fire,

33:45 strode over and snatched the jar.

33:48 He emptied its contents into the flames.

33:51 It was recorded that he and the others

33:54 had been nominated by unanimous acclamation.

33:58 On the 24th of December, aged 30 years and 4 months,

34:02 he formally took office as first consul,

34:05 dictating a proclamation to the nation pledging

34:08 to make the Republic dear to its citizens,

34:11 respectable to foreigners, formidable to enemies.

34:17 But a proclamation means nothing without a battlefield to back it up.

34:21 And within months, one presented itself.

34:25 At Marengo, in June of 1800, he found himself facing the Austrian General Melas,

34:31 who had concentrated 30,000 men and 100 field guns near Alessandria.

34:37 Napoleon was down to 22,000 with only 20 guns.

34:41 "Come back, in God's name, if you still can," he wrote to Desaix.

34:46 Desaix received the order at 1:00 and immediately set off,

34:50 his men occasionally breaking into a run

34:53 as they covered 13 km to reach the field.

34:56 By 3:00 in the afternoon, the battle appeared lost.

35:01 Melas, who'd had two painful falls from his horse that day at the age of 71,

35:07 retired to Alessandria to lie down, leaving his generals to finish things off.

35:13 Around 5:00, Desaix arrived.

35:16 After a brief exchange with Napoleon, he led his divisions into the fray.

35:21 Simultaneously, General Kellermann gathered his cavalry

35:24 and charged the Austrian flank.

35:27 The entire French line surged forward.

35:30 The Austrians faltered, fell back, and fled.

35:34 Desaix was killed leading the attack.

35:37 "I feel the most profound grief at the death

35:40 of the man I loved and esteemed the most," Napoleon wrote afterward.

35:47 With the military crisis resolved,

35:49 he turned to the machinery of the state itself.

35:52 Napoleon did not understand or like the idea of government credit,

35:57 which he saw as no more than betting on a favorable outcome.

36:01 He liked hard currency and wanted to amass as much of it as possible.

36:06 Gaudin, his finance minister, called in a friend named Nicolas Mollien,

36:11 who explained to a bewildered Napoleon the workings

36:15 of the stock market and the principle of a sinking fund.

36:18 On the 13th of February, he established the Banque de France,

36:22 handing the levers of state credit to a syndicate of private financiers

36:27 whose interests were now permanently fused with the survival of the regime.

36:32 Strikes were criminalized.

36:34 Workers were bound to the livret, an employment passbook that subjected

36:39 their movements and livelihoods to police control.

36:43 The chaotic energy of the early revolution was eradicated,

36:47 replaced by a rigid hierarchy enforced by Fouché's security apparatus.

36:54 On the 12th of August, 1800,

36:57 he appointed a commission of four jurists to draw up a civil code of laws.

37:03 Standardized contracts, the abolition of feudal obligations,

37:07 ironclad protections for private property.

37:11 Over the next year, the Council of State devoted more than 100 sessions to it,

37:16 at least 57 presided over by Napoleon,

37:19 who stamped his own views on the final version.

37:22 Those views were revealing.

37:24 Women need to be contained, he declared,

37:28 explaining that they were naturally more flighty than men

37:31 and liable to spend their husbands' money like water.

37:35 The husband must have the absolute power and right to say to his wife,

37:40 "Madam, you will not go out.

37:43 You will not go to the theater.

37:45 You will not see such and such a person."

37:48 The code would not become law until March of 1804,

37:52 when it would become known as the Code Napoléon.

37:58 He drove the councilors like slaves.

38:00 As one of them put it, one had to be made of iron to work with him.

38:05 In 1800 alone, the Council of State dealt with 911 separate measures.

38:11 It was not unusual for him to keep them at it

38:14 for 8 or 10 hours with only a 15-minute break for lunch.

38:19 "Come, come, citizens.

38:21 Wake up," he would say when he saw them flagging past midnight.

38:26 "It is only 2:00, and we must earn the money which the people

38:29 of France give us." He would toy with his snuffbox while he listened,

38:34 opening and shutting the lid, taking a pinch,

38:37 most of which fell on the white facings of his uniform.

38:41 Without looking, he'd pass the box to an aide behind his chair,

38:46 who would hand him another.

38:48 To help himself think,

38:50 he'd produce a penknife and belabor the arm of his chair with it.

38:55 The cabinetmaker replaced it regularly.

38:58 He might wake at 1:00 or 4:00 in the morning, summon his secretary,

39:02 and begin dictating in a white dressing

39:04 gown with a scarf wrapped about his head.

39:07 He hardly ever wrote himself,

39:09 partly because his hand couldn't keep up with his thoughts,

39:12 partly because neither he nor anyone else could read his handwriting.

39:17 He might pause for ice cream or something more substantial,

39:21 and then pick up exactly where he'd left off.

39:25 And so the machinery of the French state was rebuilt piece by piece.

39:30 In marathon sessions and pre-dawn dictations,

39:33 the consul had secured his grip on power.

39:37 The armies that had carried him there still waited,

39:40 hundreds of thousands of men in camps and garrisons across the country.

39:45 Beyond the borders, the old powers of Europe watched with growing unease.

39:50 The world Napoleon had forced into being was too new,

39:55 too volatile to sit quietly for long.

40:03 Chapter five.

40:05 The geopolitical chessboard.

40:09 To understand the wars that Napoleon would fight,

40:12 we need to step back from the man himself.

40:15 Because the world he stepped into was already a volatile place,

40:19 shaped by decades of rivalry between a handful of powerful states.

40:24 Five nations dominated European politics by the late 1700s.

40:30 Britain, France, Austria, Prussia, and Russia.

40:34 Between them, they decided the fate of continents.

40:37 And when diplomacy failed, as it often did, war became the final word.

40:44 Britain held the seas.

40:46 Its Royal Navy commanded more than double the warships of the French fleet,

40:51 which gave it an extraordinary advantage.

40:54 The French couldn't train their sailors properly,

40:57 couldn't access naval supplies freely,

41:00 and found their military resources pinned down on the continent.

41:05 After the Seven Years' War, which ended in 1763,

41:09 Britain had cemented its dominance over global trade and colonial

41:13 territory largely at the expense of France and Spain.

41:17 It was a maritime empire with no real challenger on the water.

41:22 On land, the picture was messier.

41:25 Prussia had clawed its way into the ranks

41:27 of the great powers only a generation before,

41:30 winning two major wars despite long odds.

41:33 But it was a fragile kind of greatness.

41:36 The kingdom was small, its population modest,

41:39 and it taxed its people heavily just to keep up appearances.

41:44 Austria, meanwhile, had long dominated Central

41:47 Europe through the Holy Roman Empire.

41:50 But it lacked the ethnic and linguistic unity of its neighbors.

41:54 It was a patchwork held together by tradition and dynastic marriages,

41:59 and it knew how vulnerable that made it.

42:03 Then, there was Russia,

42:05 which had expanded with breathtaking speed in the second half of the century.

42:10 No other European state had gained so much territory so quickly.

42:16 In 1772, Catherine II engineered the first partition of Poland,

42:22 swallowing up vast tracts of the Eastern Kingdom

42:25 and placing her preferred candidate on the Polish throne.

42:28 A few years later, victory in the Russo-Ottoman War brought

42:33 Russian control to the northern coastline of the Black Sea.

42:37 And by 1783, the Treaty of Georgievsk had extended

42:41 Russia's military presence across the Caucasus Mountains into Eastern Georgia.

42:47 Russia was hungry, and it was growing.

42:52 These rivalries weren't limited to Europe.

42:54 The Nootka Sound Crisis of 1789 showed just how far the competition had spread.

43:01 Spain had claimed the Pacific coast of North America since

43:05 the 1500s and tolerated no foreign presence in those waters.

43:11 But when British ships appeared near Vancouver Island,

43:14 the Spanish Navy seized them, imprisoned the crews,

43:17 and declared exclusive sovereignty over the entire coastline.

43:21 For a moment, it looked like war.

43:24 In the end, Spain backed down and agreed to let

43:28 the British trade and settle in unoccupied areas above San Francisco.

43:33 A small diplomatic episode, perhaps, but it revealed something important.

43:38 European powers were now staking claims across the globe,

43:42 and any one of those claims could ignite a wider conflict.

43:47 India was another flashpoint.

43:49 The British East India Company had been

43:52 tightening its grip on the subcontinent for decades,

43:55 but its position was far from secure.

43:58 Powerful regional states like the Maratha Confederation

44:02 and the Dominion of Hyderabad controlled vast territories.

44:06 And to the south, the Kingdom of Mysore

44:09 under Tipu Sultan had been a persistent thorn.

44:13 Tipu had welcomed French Republican envoys,

44:16 planted a tree of liberty at his capital of Seringapatam,

44:20 and made overtures to French forces in Mauritius.

44:24 For the British, this was alarming.

44:27 In the spring of 1799, Richard Wellesley, the governor-general, went to war.

44:34 The Fourth Mysore War was short and brutal.

44:37 British forces stormed Seringapatam on the 4th of May,

44:42 and Tipu Sultan was killed in the fighting.

44:45 Wellesley then turned his attention to the Marathas,

44:48 negotiating the Treaty of Bassein, which brought the Maratha leadership under

44:52 British influence in exchange for military protection.

44:56 India was being reshaped piece by piece.

45:02 The revolution had already upended Napoleon's life, as we've seen.

45:07 But it had also upended the entire European order.

45:11 The execution of King Louis XVI

45:13 in January 1793 horrified the continent's monarchies.

45:19 And the National Convention's so-called Edict of Fraternity made things worse,

45:24 promising assistance to any people who wished to overthrow their rulers.

45:28 The British Prime Minister put it plainly,

45:31 "We are not at war with the opinions of the closet." he said.

45:36 "We are at war with armed opinions." By the spring of 1793,

45:42 most of Europe had joined the First Coalition against France.

45:49 The early campaigns went badly for the French.

45:52 Austro-Prussian forces invaded and pushed towards Paris.

45:56 The allies issued the Brunswick Manifesto,

45:58 threatening to level the capital if the royal family was harmed.

46:02 It was meant to intimidate.

46:04 Instead, it enraged the population.

46:07 And at Valmy, in September 1792,

46:10 French gunners held their ground against Prussian veterans,

46:14 refusing to be silenced.

46:16 The General Kellermann raised his hat and cried,

46:20 "Vive la nation!" The words swept through the ranks.

46:24 It was a modest battle in military terms, but a seismic one in spirit.

46:29 From that moment, the revolution mobilized on a scale Europe had never seen.

46:35 The Committee of Public Safety launched the levée en masse,

46:39 calling on every citizen to serve.

46:41 "From this moment until the enemy shall have been driven

46:44 from the soil of the Republic," declared the National Convention,

46:48 "all Frenchmen are in permanent requisition

46:51 for the service of the armies." Within a year, 14 new armies had been raised.

46:57 Some 800,000 men were under arms.

47:01 Prussia, exhausted, signed the Treaty of Basel

47:04 in 1795 and withdrew from the war,

47:08 recognizing French control of the left bank of the Rhine.

47:12 Historians have called that treaty a death

47:14 certificate for the Holy Roman Empire,

47:16 since Prussia chose its own national interest over the old imperial order.

47:21 And Poland, partitioned a third and final time,

47:25 was erased from the map entirely.

47:29 The old chessboard of European diplomacy had been upended.

47:34 Traditional alliances fractured, colonial possessions changed hands,

47:39 and the sheer scale of French mobilization

47:42 left every neighboring power scrambling to respond.

47:45 The exhaustion was mutual.

47:48 Years of continuous warfare, stretching from the Rhine to the Indian Ocean,

47:53 had drained treasuries and armies alike.

47:56 A pause was coming, a fragile diplomatic intermission.

48:00 But it would not hold for long.

48:08 Chapter six.

48:10 The intermission and the rupture.

48:14 For the first time in nearly a decade,

48:16 the guns across continental Europe fell silent.

48:20 The Peace of Lunéville, signed in early 1801,

48:23 had done what many thought impossible.

48:26 Austria, humiliated and exhausted,

48:30 gave up the territorial gains it had won in Italy just 4 years earlier.

48:35 The treaty recognized a constellation of new republics,

48:38 Swiss, Dutch, Genoese, Lombard.

48:42 Each one a French dependency in all but name.

48:46 Bonaparte had, through force and negotiation, redrawn the map.

48:52 And he wasn't finished.

48:54 In July of that year, he concluded a concordat with the papacy,

48:58 mending a rift that had torn through French society since the revolution.

49:04 "The government of the Republic acknowledges that the Catholic, Apostolic,

49:09 and Roman religion is the religion of the great

49:12 majority of French citizens," read the opening lines.

49:16 It was a striking gesture from a man who had little personal use for religion.

49:21 Church dioceses were reorganized, parishes restructured.

49:25 And buried within the agreement was perhaps its most consequential provision.

49:30 The Roman Catholic Church formally surrendered all claims

49:34 to the lands that had been confiscated and nationalized since 1790.

49:39 A decade of seizures made permanent with the stroke of a pen.

49:46 Then came the peace with Britain.

49:48 On the 25th of March, 1802, France and Britain signed the Treaty of Amiens,

49:54 ending almost 2 years of careful grinding negotiation.

49:59 Bonaparte's brother Joseph had handled the French side

50:02 and raced to Paris with the signed document.

50:06 He arrived during a theater performance,

50:09 which was duly interrupted so Bonaparte could

50:11 present his brother to a cheering audience.

50:14 Across the English Channel, mail coaches carried the news with the words

50:19 "Peace with France" chalked on their sides.

50:23 They were met with celebrations in towns across the country,

50:27 crowds shouting approval for the French leader by name.

50:31 George III renounced his title of King of France,

50:36 a holdover from the Hundred Years' War

50:39 that his predecessors had clung to for centuries.

50:43 Britain agreed to return captured French colonies and those of her allies,

50:48 keeping only Ceylon and Trinidad.

50:51 France, in turn, accepted the return of Egypt

50:54 to the Ottoman Porte and the Papal States to the Pope.

50:58 Malta was to go back to the Order of St.

51:00 John under the protection of Naples.

51:03 It was tidy, comprehensive, and doomed.

51:08 Even as the ink dried, Bonaparte was looking westward.

51:13 He dispatched a massive expeditionary force to Saint-Domingue, modern-day Haiti,

51:18 which had been in open rebellion since

51:20 the early 1790s under the leadership of Toussaint Louverture.

51:25 The force was commanded by Bonaparte's own brother-in-law, Leclerc.

51:30 And it was one of the largest overseas military

51:33 operations any European power had attempted in that age.

51:37 They arrived in January 1802.

51:39 Some local commanders defected to the French,

51:42 but Louverture called on the entire population to resist,

51:45 then withdrew into the interior.

51:48 The fighting was savage.

51:50 Deprived of water and food in this overwhelming heat, one eyewitness wrote,

51:56 "The troops had to chew on balls of lead

51:58 in the hope of quenching their unbearable thirst." In early June,

52:03 Louverture was lured into a trap and captured.

52:08 He was shipped to France and locked

52:10 away in solitary confinement at Fort de Joux.

52:14 William Wordsworth would later describe him as "the most unhappy man

52:19 of men." He died less than a year after his imprisonment.

52:24 More than 50,000 French soldiers, sailors,

52:27 and civilians perished in the campaign,

52:30 alongside a far greater number of black troops and civilians.

52:36 The disaster in the Caribbean had consequences that rippled across an ocean.

52:43 [clears throat] In 1803, Bonaparte surprised American negotiators

52:47 by offering the entire Louisiana Territory,

52:50 over 800,000 square miles, for $15 million.

52:55 The money was $15 The money was handled through a Dutch

52:57 banking house in Amsterdam and a British one in London,

53:01 who sold the stock and transferred the cash to France.

53:05 The final transfer came on the 20th of December, 1803.

53:09 Bonaparte had cut his losses in the Americas

53:12 and turned his attention back to Europe,

53:14 where the fragile peace was already coming apart.

53:19 Britain refused to recognize the new Italian Republics,

53:23 viewing them as threats to the balance of power on the continent.

53:27 British newspapers portrayed Bonaparte

53:30 as a yellow-skinned pygmy, a monstrous hybrid.

53:34 One tabloid called him "an unclassifiable being, half African, half European,

53:40 a Mediterranean mulatto." His wife, Josephine, was portrayed as a harlot.

53:46 His stepdaughter, Hortense, was accused of incest.

53:51 The French government retaliated by confiscating British goods,

53:55 banning their importation across French-controlled territories,

53:59 and ordering the imprisonment of any British subjects found within reach.

54:04 Bonaparte launched massive naval construction,

54:07 urging his ministry to build as many vessels as possible.

54:10 "Money," he said, "was no object." By 1804,

54:15 he expected to have more than 1,600 flat-bottomed invasion boats,

54:20 supported by another thousand fishing vessels converted into transports.

54:27 The Peace of Amiens had lasted just 420 days.

54:31 Its collapse unleashed 12 years of war and misery

54:36 that would shape the destinies of Europe and the wider world.

54:40 Meanwhile, the man at the center of it all had been quietly consolidating.

54:45 He secured the consulship for life in August 1802,

54:50 along with the right to name his own successor.

54:53 Officers attended his person.

54:55 Honors were paid to the women of his household.

54:59 A privileged family surrounded him in ceremony.

55:02 Everything, observers noted, was monarchical.

55:07 Everything except the title of consul.

55:10 And that name, too, was destined soon to disappear.

55:19 Chapter 7, The Sun Emperor.

55:24 By the autumn of 1804,

55:26 he had survived more assassination attempts than most men would care to count.

55:32 Royalist conspirators, Jacobin holdouts,

55:36 even a bomb that had torn apart a Parisian street and killed bystanders.

55:41 The question of succession had become impossible to ignore.

55:46 If he died without an heir,

55:47 without a dynasty, the whole enterprise would collapse overnight.

55:52 And so the decision was made.

55:54 France would have an emperor.

55:57 The coronation was set for the 2nd of December at Notre Dame Cathedral.

56:03 Months of preparation went into transforming the Gothic

56:07 interior into something closer to ancient Rome.

56:11 The architect Fontaine oversaw the construction of enormous wooden grandstands,

56:16 draped the walls in silk, and filled the space with thousands of wax candles.

56:22 Pope Pius VII had been persuaded, or perhaps pressured is the fairer word,

56:27 to make the long journey across the Alps in freezing late autumn weather.

56:32 He arrived in Paris exhausted and was promptly subjected to days

56:37 of calculated diplomatic slights designed to make one thing clear.

56:42 The Pope was here to bless the occasion.

56:45 He was not here to run it.

56:49 On the day itself, the procession

56:51 to the cathedral stretched through the streets of Paris.

56:54 Thousands of soldiers lined the route.

56:57 80 carriages rolled past the crowds.

57:01 The Imperial carriage was drawn by eight

57:03 dun-colored horses and covered in gold leaf.

57:07 Josephine wore white satin embroidered in gold and silver.

57:11 He wore a heavy crimson velvet mantle, lined with ermine,

57:16 covered in golden bees,

57:18 a deliberate replacement for the old Bourbon fleur-de-lis.

57:22 And when the moment came for the crowning,

57:24 he did something that no one in the cathedral would forget.

57:28 He took the laurel wreath of gold from the altar himself.

57:32 He placed it on his own head.

57:34 Then he turned and crowned Josephine, who knelt before him in tears.

57:40 The message was plain enough.

57:43 He owed his throne to no one.

57:47 With the spectacle behind him, his attention turned entirely to the coast.

57:53 150,000 veterans of the Revolutionary Wars were camped around Boulogne,

57:58 living in rows of organized wooden huts,

58:01 drilling day after day, staring across the Channel at the British shoreline.

58:06 They were waiting for naval control of the crossing.

58:09 It never came.

58:11 At Trafalgar, Horatio Nelson destroyed the combined Franco-Spanish fleet,

58:16 and with it any serious hope of invading Britain.

58:20 The army at Boulogne was immediately renamed the Grande Armée,

58:24 ordered to break camp, and sent marching east to meet a new threat.

58:28 Austria and Russia had formed the Third Coalition.

58:34 The speed of what followed was extraordinary.

58:37 Seven columns of troops crossed the Rhine simultaneously,

58:41 each operating independently, but converging on a single objective.

58:46 They covered up to 30 km a day, carrying their own ammunition and rations,

58:52 living off the land to avoid the slow

58:54 supply trains that weighed down traditional armies.

58:58 The Austrian commander, General Karl Mack,

59:00 had positioned his forces at the fortress of Ulm,

59:04 expecting the French to come through the Black Forest.

59:07 They swung far to the north instead,

59:10 looped around behind him, and cut off every route of escape.

59:16 On the 20th of October, 1805, Mack surrendered 27,000 men, 60 cannons,

59:23 and all his colors without a major battle having been fought.

59:29 He He his troops afterward, "Soldiers of the Grande Armee,

59:34 I have destroyed the Austrian army by simply

59:36 marching." The French then pushed east along the Danube,

59:41 taking Vienna with barely a fight after Marshall Lannes talked his way across

59:46 the main bridge by convincing the Austrian

59:49 defenders that an armistice had already been signed.

59:53 It hadn't.

59:55 The decisive moment came at Austerlitz on the 2nd of December,

1:00:00 exactly 1 year to the day after the coronation.

1:00:04 He had deliberately weakened his right flank,

1:00:07 baiting the combined Austro-Russian army into descending

1:00:11 from the high ground of the Pratzen Heights.

1:00:14 It was a trap, and it depended entirely on precise timing

1:00:18 and the arrival of Marshall Davout's corps after a forced march from Vienna.

1:00:23 As heavy morning fog lifted, sunlight broke across the field.

1:00:28 Marshall Soult's men charged up the now exposed

1:00:31 heights and split the coalition army clean in two.

1:00:36 Thousands of Russian soldiers tried to flee across the frozen Satschan Ponds.

1:00:42 French artillery fired into the ice and shattered it beneath them.

1:00:48 Austerlitz ended the Third Coalition.

1:00:51 Austria signed a punitive Treaty of Pressburg,

1:00:54 losing vast territories and paying a crushing indemnity.

1:00:59 The thousand-year-old Holy Roman Empire was formally dissolved,

1:01:04 replaced by the Confederation of the Rhine,

1:01:07 a string of German client states built to serve French interests.

1:01:12 Prussia, which had stayed neutral during

1:01:14 all of this, now belatedly declared war,

1:01:17 furious at territorial violations and urged

1:01:20 on by the fiercely anti-French Queen Louise.

1:01:23 The Prussian army marched into Thuringia with confidence

1:01:27 and the outdated tactics of Frederick the Great.

1:01:31 On the 14th of October, 1806,

1:01:35 at the twin battles of Jena and Auerstedt, that confidence was destroyed.

1:01:40 He crushed what he believed was the main Prussian force at Jena.

1:01:45 Meanwhile, Marshall Davout's isolated corps of 26,000 men ran

1:01:50 into the actual main army of 63,000 and systematically broke it apart.

1:01:57 The pursuit that followed was relentless.

1:02:01 Within weeks, French troops had taken

1:02:04 Berlin and paraded through the Brandenburg Gate.

1:02:08 What remained of the Prussian forces retreated

1:02:10 into Poland to link up with the Russians,

1:02:13 dragging the war into the freezing mud of Eastern Europe.

1:02:19 The winter campaign that followed was brutal.

1:02:21 At Eylau in February of 1807, the two armies fought in a blinding snowstorm.

1:02:28 Men froze to death standing upright.

1:02:31 Marshall Augereau's entire corps lost its bearings

1:02:35 in the blizzard and stumbled directly into Russian artillery.

1:02:40 A massive cavalry charge led by Marshall Murat was

1:02:43 the only thing that saved the French center from collapsing entirely.

1:02:47 Over 40,000 casualties were left bleeding in the snow.

1:02:51 It was a stalemate and it shook morale badly.

1:02:56 The decisive victory only came months later at Friedland in June,

1:03:00 where the French caught the Russian army pinned against the River

1:03:03 Alle and tore it apart with massed artillery at close range.

1:03:09 And then came Tilsit.

1:03:12 A raft was built and moored in the middle of the River Niemen.

1:03:17 He and Tsar Alexander I met on it, embraced in front of their cheering armies,

1:03:23 and sat down to divide Europe between them.

1:03:26 The Tsar reportedly opened by saying,

1:03:28 "I hate the English as much as you do." He replied, "If that's the case,

1:03:34 peace is made." The continent now had two masters,

1:03:40 but the sea still belonged to Britain and no

1:03:42 treaty signed on a river raft could change that.

1:03:46 The French navy was gone.

1:03:48 A direct strike on London was a physical impossibility.

1:03:53 If Britain was going to be brought to its knees,

1:03:55 it would have to be done another way entirely.

1:04:04 Chapter 8, The Economic World War.

1:04:09 On the 21st of November, Napoleon issued the Berlin Decree.

1:04:13 It declared the British Isles to be in a state of blockade.

1:04:17 No country under French influence was permitted to trade with Britain,

1:04:21 receive British ships, or even correspond with British merchants.

1:04:26 Any British goods found on the continent were to be seized and destroyed.

1:04:31 The idea, which came to be known as the Continental System,

1:04:35 was blunt in its logic.

1:04:38 Britain's military strength rested on its wealth.

1:04:41 Its wealth came from trade.

1:04:44 Cut off the trade and the wealth would dry up

1:04:47 and with it the ability to fund coalition after coalition against France.

1:04:55 There was a problem with this logic and it was a serious one.

1:04:59 Britain was in the middle of an industrial revolution.

1:05:02 Its factories were multiplying output at a pace

1:05:04 that no continental economy could match.

1:05:08 Its financial institutions ran deep.

1:05:10 The Bank of England, the insurance networks at Lloyd's,

1:05:14 the capital markets of London, these weren't just wealthy.

1:05:18 They were structurally resilient,

1:05:20 designed to absorb shocks and keep functioning.

1:05:23 France had nothing like them.

1:05:25 Napoleon was trying to strangle an economy that was,

1:05:28 in many respects, stronger than his own.

1:05:32 The British hit back almost immediately.

1:05:35 The government issued the Orders in Council,

1:05:38 which forbade neutral ships from entering French-controlled ports unless

1:05:42 they first stopped in Britain and paid a transit duty.

1:05:46 Napoleon countered with the Milan Decree the following year,

1:05:49 declaring that any neutral vessel that submitted to British inspection

1:05:53 would be treated as an enemy ship and seized on site.

1:05:57 The result was a kind of legal trap.

1:06:00 A merchant captain sailing across the Atlantic couldn't obey

1:06:04 one side without breaking the rules of the other.

1:06:08 Neutral nations, the United States chief among them,

1:06:11 found their shipping fleets caught in the middle.

1:06:15 The tensions that built from this impossible situation

1:06:18 would eventually spill over into the War of 1812.

1:06:24 Across Europe, the effects of the blockade

1:06:27 rippled outward in strange and uneven ways.

1:06:31 Colonial goods vanished from the markets almost overnight.

1:06:36 There was no more cane sugar, no coffee, no cheap cotton.

1:06:41 Farmers in northern Europe began cultivating sugar beets on a massive scale.

1:06:46 Roasted chicory root became a common substitute for coffee,

1:06:50 though by most accounts a deeply unsatisfying one.

1:06:54 In landlocked regions like Saxony, Belgium, and parts of Eastern France,

1:06:59 textile manufacturers found themselves suddenly free of British competition.

1:07:05 The removal of cheap,

1:07:06 high-quality imports created a captive market and for a time profits soared.

1:07:15 But the great port cities told a very different story.

1:07:18 Amsterdam, Hamburg, Bordeaux,

1:07:21 these were places that had lived and breathed international trade for centuries.

1:07:27 The sudden halt of maritime commerce devastated them.

1:07:30 Merchants went bankrupt.

1:07:32 Dockworkers lost their livelihoods.

1:07:35 And the inland textile boom didn't last either,

1:07:39 because without raw cotton imports arriving by sea,

1:07:43 the factories that had been thriving began to starve for materials.

1:07:48 Thousands of weavers were left unemployed in the very

1:07:51 regions the system was supposed to protect.

1:07:55 Enforcing all of this required an enormous bureaucratic apparatus.

1:08:01 French customs officers patrolled the coastline from the Baltic to the Adriatic,

1:08:06 conducting raids on merchant warehouses and dragging confiscated British goods

1:08:11 into public squares where they were piled high and set on fire.

1:08:15 The bonfires were meant as a warning.

1:08:18 They were also an admission that the goods kept getting through.

1:08:22 The coastline was simply too long, the borders too porous,

1:08:26 and the profits of smuggling too enormous to resist.

1:08:30 Entire fishing communities along the coast abandoned

1:08:34 their nets and turned to the black market.

1:08:37 Contraband moved in false-bottomed boats, on carts pulled by dogs,

1:08:42 through night landings on remote beaches.

1:08:45 The British occupied the tiny island of Heligoland

1:08:49 in the North Sea and turned it into a floating warehouse,

1:08:52 a massive smuggling depot just off the German

1:08:55 coast where thousands of vessels transferred textiles,

1:08:59 spices, and weapons to local runners who

1:09:02 filtered everything inland through the river networks.

1:09:08 Corruption among French officials was widespread.

1:09:11 Commanders posted to remote,

1:09:13 hostile stretches of coastline were underpaid and far from home.

1:09:17 Many accepted bribes to look the other way.

1:09:21 In Hamburg, the diplomat Louis de

1:09:23 Bourrienne amassed a personal fortune by simply

1:09:26 charging his own illegal tariff on British goods passing through the port.

1:09:33 The deeper flaw was this, Europe needed British

1:09:37 goods more than Britain needed the European market.

1:09:41 Denied access to the continent,

1:09:44 British merchants expanded aggressively into South America and Asia.

1:09:49 Their overall export revenues actually increased.

1:09:53 Meanwhile, the prices of basic commodities

1:09:56 across Europe climbed steadily, wages stagnated,

1:10:00 and ordinary people bore the weight of an embargo that enriched

1:10:04 a narrow band of French-aligned industrialists and black market operators.

1:10:10 Resentment toward French rule grew.

1:10:13 Quietly at first, then not so quietly.

1:10:16 Former allies began to feel like subjects.

1:10:20 And the desperation for hard currency eventually pushed the French government

1:10:25 to issue special licenses allowing select

1:10:28 merchants to trade directly with Britain, a blatant violation of its own system

1:10:33 that enraged partners like Russia and Prussia,

1:10:37 who were suffering immense economic damage to enforce

1:10:41 a blockade that France itself was breaking for profit.

1:10:47 To keep the system from collapsing, Napoleon was forced to keep expanding.

1:10:51 Whenever a coastal territory failed to suppress smuggling,

1:10:55 French troops marched in.

1:10:57 The kingdom of Holland was annexed.

1:10:59 So were the Hanseatic cities of Bremen and Hamburg.

1:11:03 So were the Papal States.

1:11:06 Each annexation stretched the empire thinner,

1:11:10 demanded more soldiers, more administrators, more money.

1:11:15 And it was this very logic,

1:11:17 this relentless need to seal every harbor and control every dock,

1:11:22 that now turned French attention southward, toward the Iberian Peninsula,

1:11:28 where the ports of Portugal remained stubbornly open to British trade.

1:11:38 Chapter 9, The Iberian Quagmire.

1:11:43 It began, as these things often do, with a plan drawn up in secret.

1:11:50 The Treaty of Fontainebleau, signed behind closed doors,

1:11:54 carved Portugal into pieces between France and Spain before

1:11:58 anyone in Lisbon had the faintest idea what was coming.

1:12:01 On paper, it looked clean.

1:12:04 A quick march, a swift occupation,

1:12:06 and Portugal would fall neatly into the Continental System.

1:12:10 The emperor would have his coastline sealed,

1:12:12 Britain would lose another trading partner,

1:12:15 and General Jean Andoche Junot was the man tasked with making it happen.

1:12:22 Junot's march south was brutal from the start.

1:12:26 His army was thrown together in haste,

1:12:28 filled with raw conscripts who had barely learned to hold a musket.

1:12:33 They crossed the barren interior of Spain in freezing autumn rain,

1:12:37 the roads turning to mud beneath their boots.

1:12:41 Food ran out, horses collapsed.

1:12:44 Artillery pieces were abandoned where they sank into the earth

1:12:48 because there was no way to pull them free.

1:12:50 By the time the column reached Lisbon,

1:12:52 the soldiers looked less like an invading army and more like refugees.

1:12:58 Many were barefoot, most were starving.

1:13:01 They could barely have fought a tavern brawl, let alone a battle.

1:13:06 And they were too late.

1:13:07 Just hours before Junot's bedraggled troops stumbled onto the Lisbon docks,

1:13:12 the entire Braganza royal family had boarded their ships.

1:13:17 The state treasury went with them.

1:13:19 So did the Portuguese fleet.

1:13:22 They sailed for Brazil under British naval escort,

1:13:25 and Junot could do nothing but stand on the quayside and watch.

1:13:29 The prize had slipped away across the Atlantic.

1:13:34 Still, French boots were now on Iberian soil,

1:13:38 and there was no intention of removing them.

1:13:41 In Spain, a vicious family quarrel had

1:13:43 been tearing the royal household apart for months.

1:13:47 King Charles the IV,

1:13:49 weak-willed and dominated by his deeply unpopular minister Manuel Godoy,

1:13:54 found himself locked in a power struggle with his own son, Ferdinand.

1:13:58 The conflict boiled over in the Mutiny of Aranjuez,

1:14:02 a violent upheaval that forced Charles to abdicate.

1:14:07 Ferdinand seized the throne.

1:14:09 The country was in chaos.

1:14:11 And into that chaos, the emperor saw an opportunity.

1:14:17 He summoned both father and son to the French

1:14:21 city of Bayonne under the pretense of mediating their dispute.

1:14:26 It was a trap, of course.

1:14:29 Once the two men were isolated on French soil,

1:14:32 he subjected them to a campaign of intimidation.

1:14:36 He made no effort to disguise his contempt.

1:14:40 "They are the most wretched family in existence." he reportedly said.

1:14:45 By the time it was over, both Charles and Ferdinand had renounced

1:14:49 their claims to the Spanish throne entirely.

1:14:53 The Bourbons were finished.

1:14:57 In their place, the emperor installed his older brother,

1:15:00 Joseph Bonaparte, as king in Madrid.

1:15:03 He assumed the Spanish people would welcome it.

1:15:07 A fresh start, a modern administration,

1:15:10 an end to the corruption of the old regime.

1:15:13 It was a spectacular miscalculation.

1:15:16 Spain was a country of 10 and 1/2 million people,

1:15:20 and woven through every village and valley was the Catholic Church,

1:15:24 a vast institution that functioned almost as a parallel state,

1:15:29 200,000 clergy, 2,000 monasteries.

1:15:34 The church owned enormous tracts of land, ran schools, administered welfare,

1:15:40 and held a kind of moral authority over rural

1:15:42 life that no foreign power could hope to replicate.

1:15:46 When Joseph's new government moved almost immediately

1:15:49 to suppress 2/3 of the country's convents and monasteries,

1:15:53 the reaction was ferocious.

1:15:56 For millions of ordinary Spaniards,

1:15:58 this was an attack on the fabric of their world.

1:16:03 Geography worked against the French, too.

1:16:06 In places like the Low Countries or northern Italy,

1:16:09 the occupation had been relatively straightforward.

1:16:13 Those regions were urbanized, with established municipal bureaucracies

1:16:18 and a commercial class willing to cooperate.

1:16:21 Spain was different.

1:16:23 The population was overwhelmingly rural and scattered across vast distances,

1:16:27 governed by a landed nobility that had little dependence on urban supply chains.

1:16:32 There was no centralized administrative machinery in the countryside

1:16:37 for the French to seize hold of.

1:16:39 They could take cities, but they couldn't take Spain.

1:16:43 The spark came on the 2nd of May, 1808, the Dos de Mayo.

1:16:49 French troops in Madrid attempted to escort the last

1:16:53 remaining members of the royal family out of the city,

1:16:56 and the people of the capital simply snapped.

1:16:59 Citizens attacked the French with paving stones, kitchen knives,

1:17:03 boiling water, whatever they could lay their hands on.

1:17:07 A street battle erupted that left hundreds dead.

1:17:12 Marshal Joachim Murat, commanding the garrison,

1:17:16 responded with a savagery calculated to terrify.

1:17:20 He unleashed the Mameluke cavalry of the Imperial Guard,

1:17:24 who rode through the civilian crowds cutting people down in the streets.

1:17:29 The next morning, French firing squads lined up hundreds

1:17:33 of captured insurgents on the Príncipe Pío Hill and shot them.

1:17:38 Francisco Goya would later paint those executions,

1:17:42 and his images remain among the most

1:17:44 harrowing depictions of war ever committed to canvas.

1:17:49 News of the massacre spread fast.

1:17:52 Across the provinces, uprisings broke out organized by local juntas,

1:17:58 regional councils that drew their authority from existing power structures.

1:18:03 The local nobility rallied their tenants.

1:18:06 The clergy rallied their congregations.

1:18:09 But even in their shared hatred of the French, these councils were divided.

1:18:14 Reactionary factions, the serviles,

1:18:17 fought to preserve aristocratic and clerical privilege.

1:18:22 Liberal factions, the liberales,

1:18:24 saw the crisis as a chance to push for constitutional reform,

1:18:29 legal equality, and end to the old feudal order.

1:18:33 The two sides needed each other to fight the war.

1:18:37 They also despised each other.

1:18:39 This contradiction would hamper the resistance for years and sow

1:18:43 chaos long after the last French soldier had left.

1:18:49 In July of 1808, the myth of French

1:18:52 invincibility died in the plains of Andalusia.

1:18:56 At the Battle of Bailén, General Pierre Dupont found his army exhausted,

1:19:01 dehydrated, and completely surrounded by Spanish regulars and armed peasants.

1:19:06 He surrendered his entire corps.

1:19:10 18,000 men laid down their weapons.

1:19:13 It was an unprecedented humiliation,

1:19:16 and the news sent shockwaves across every occupied nation in Europe.

1:19:21 If the French could be beaten in open battle, then perhaps the war could be won.

1:19:28 Britain moved quickly.

1:19:29 An expeditionary force landed in Portugal under the command of Arthur Wellesley,

1:19:33 a methodical, sharp-eyed officer who understood defensive

1:19:37 warfare the way a watchmaker understands gears.

1:19:41 At Vimeiro, he repelled Junot's frontal assaults

1:19:45 with carefully timed volleys of infantry musketry.

1:19:49 It was precise, economical, devastating.

1:19:54 And it was a preview of the kind of fighting that would

1:19:56 define the British campaigns in the peninsula for years to come.

1:20:03 What followed was a guerrilla war, the term itself literally meaning little war,

1:20:09 and it bled the French occupation white over the next 5 years.

1:20:13 Out in the countryside, French taxation, forced conscription,

1:20:17 and aggressive requisitioning drove the peasantry into the mountains.

1:20:22 These Spanish partisans knew every ridge and ravine.

1:20:27 They ambushed supply convoys, assassinated isolated couriers,

1:20:31 and vanished back into terrain the French couldn't hope to navigate.

1:20:36 The result was that the occupation only ever

1:20:39 controlled the ground directly beneath its soldiers' feet.

1:20:43 Step off the main road, and you were in enemy territory.

1:20:49 The violence escalated beyond anything resembling conventional warfare.

1:20:54 Both sides abandoned the old rules entirely.

1:20:57 French soldiers burned villages, assaulted the inhabitants, executed clergy.

1:21:03 Spanish guerrillas tortured captured Frenchmen, boiling them alive,

1:21:08 burying them to the neck in the dirt,

1:21:10 nailing them to trees along the rural highways.

1:21:14 Each atrocity justified the next,

1:21:16 a grinding cycle of cruelty that consumed the countryside.

1:21:22 To protect his vital base in Lisbon,

1:21:24 Wellesley constructed the lines of Torres Vedras,

1:21:27 a vast network of forts, redoubts,

1:21:30 and trenches stretching from the Atlantic coast to the Tagus River.

1:21:35 When Marshal Masséna advanced into Portugal with a French army,

1:21:39 he hit this wall and could go no further.

1:21:43 The countryside behind the lines had been deliberately stripped bare.

1:21:47 Masséna's men found nothing to eat, nothing to forage.

1:21:51 They starved in the desolate landscape for weeks

1:21:54 before pulling back in a disastrous retreat.

1:21:59 At its height, over 250,000 French soldiers were pinned down across Spain.

1:22:05 They chased a phantom enemy through the mountains,

1:22:08 an enemy they could wound but never kill.

1:22:11 And all the while, Wellesley's Anglo-Portuguese regulars

1:22:15 operated from their secure coastal supply base,

1:22:19 striking when the moment was right, withdrawing when it wasn't.

1:22:23 The peninsula became an open wound in the side of the empire,

1:22:28 one that would never heal.

1:22:31 And while those hundreds of thousands of soldiers

1:22:34 bled and starved across the Iberian interior,

1:22:37 the ripples of the crisis were traveling outward, far beyond Europe.

1:22:42 The collapse of traditional trade routes

1:22:45 and the sheer absorption of military attention

1:22:47 on the continent had created an enormous

1:22:50 vacuum at the edges of the established order.

1:22:53 Ancient empires in the Middle East began to fracture.

1:22:57 Colonial authorities in the Americas sensed

1:23:00 that the grip of their European masters was loosening.

1:23:03 The global order, already strained to breaking,

1:23:07 was about to be renegotiated violently by powers

1:23:11 that had been waiting for exactly this kind of opportunity.

1:23:20 Chapter 10.

1:23:22 The global fringes.

1:23:26 While the great powers of Europe battered one another across familiar ground,

1:23:30 the tremors of their conflict reached far beyond the continent.

1:23:34 Across oceans and mountain ranges,

1:23:38 in places most Europeans could barely find on a map,

1:23:41 the wars remade entire civilizations.

1:23:45 And it's to those distant fronts that we turn now,

1:23:49 where the consequences were every bit

1:23:51 as dramatic and often a good deal bloodier.

1:23:55 In Istanbul, the Ottoman Sultan Selim III had watched

1:23:59 the rise of European military power with growing alarm.

1:24:03 His response was a sweeping reform program called the Nizam-ı Cedid,

1:24:08 which aimed to drag the Ottoman army into the modern age.

1:24:12 New infantry units were raised,

1:24:15 dressed in European-style uniforms, and drilled to Western commands.

1:24:20 They bypassed the old military hierarchy entirely.

1:24:25 And the Janissaries,

1:24:26 that ancient warrior class who held enormous political and social influence,

1:24:31 saw the whole thing as a betrayal of tradition,

1:24:35 of their status, of Islam itself.

1:24:40 In May of 1807, auxiliaries known as the Yamaks mutinied along the Bosphorus.

1:24:47 The Janissaries and the conservative

1:24:48 clerics rallied behind them almost immediately.

1:24:52 They marched on the Topkapi Palace,

1:24:55 demanding the heads of the reformist ministers.

1:24:58 Selim was deposed, locked away in the royal cages,

1:25:03 and eventually murdered by his own cousins

1:25:05 to make sure he could never reclaim the throne.

1:25:10 Meanwhile, the Ottoman Empire was fighting a grinding war

1:25:14 against Russia across the Danubian principalities and the rugged Caucasus.

1:25:20 Russian forces under Mikhail Kutuzov achieved

1:25:23 a decisive encirclement at the Battle of Slobozia.

1:25:27 The Treaty of Bucharest, signed in 1812,

1:25:30 forced the Ottomans to hand over Bessarabia.

1:25:33 For Russia, the timing was fortunate.

1:25:36 It secured their southern flank just as Napoleon's

1:25:39 army was preparing to cross the Niemen.

1:25:43 Further south, in Serbia,

1:25:45 a fierce local rebellion had erupted against the Dahije,

1:25:50 corrupt Janissary commanders who had murdered prominent Serbian nobles.

1:25:55 The uprising was led by Karađorđe,

1:25:57 a wealthy pig trader with no patience for diplomacy.

1:26:01 What began as a localized revolt

1:26:04 quickly became a full-scale war for independence,

1:26:07 a sign of how badly Ottoman authority had frayed across its European provinces.

1:26:14 Deep in the Caucasus, Russia was expanding aggressively,

1:26:19 annexing Georgian kingdoms and clashing with the Qajar dynasty of Iran.

1:26:24 Fath Ali Shah, desperate for a European ally, turned to France.

1:26:30 The Treaty of Finkenstein in 1807 promised French military aid and the return

1:26:35 of lost territories in exchange for Iranian support against British India.

1:26:40 A French military mission under General Gardane duly arrived in Tehran,

1:26:45 setting up cannon foundries and drilling Iranian soldiers in modern tactics.

1:26:51 It all evaporated the moment the Treaty of Tilsit was signed.

1:26:56 France abandoned its Iranian partners overnight to appease Russia.

1:27:02 British diplomats moved in immediately.

1:27:05 Sir John Malcolm and Sir Harford

1:27:06 Jones arrived with generous financial subsidies,

1:27:09 modern firearms, and experienced military advisers.

1:27:13 Even so, Iranian forces suffered a crushing defeat at Aslanduz.

1:27:18 The Treaty of Gulistan in 1813 forced Iran

1:27:22 to permanently cede its Caucasian territories to Russia.

1:27:26 It was a pattern that played out again

1:27:28 and again across the globe during these years.

1:27:31 One alliance collapsed, another filled the gap,

1:27:34 and the people caught in the middle paid the price.

1:27:38 Britain, for its part,

1:27:40 was busy dismantling the overseas colonies of every rival it could reach.

1:27:45 In 1806, a heavily armed fleet arrived

1:27:49 off the Dutch Cape Colony in South Africa.

1:27:52 British infantry defeated the Dutch defenders at Blaauwberg,

1:27:56 securing the vital sea route to the Indian Ocean.

1:28:00 That same year, acting entirely without official authorization,

1:28:04 Commodore Sir Home Popham sailed across the Atlantic and captured Buenos Aires,

1:28:10 physically seizing the colonial treasury.

1:28:13 The local Spanish authorities fled,

1:28:16 leaving the city's defense to ordinary citizens.

1:28:21 Those citizens organized a massive urban militia under Santiago de Liniers.

1:28:27 They fought the British occupation in fierce street-to-street combat,

1:28:31 pouring boiling water from the flat rooftops

1:28:34 and dropping heavy paving stones onto the soldiers below.

1:28:38 The British commander, William Beresford,

1:28:40 was forced into unconditional surrender.

1:28:43 A revenge expedition under General Whitelocke arrived

1:28:47 the following year and fared even worse.

1:28:50 He ordered his men to march down the narrow streets without firing,

1:28:54 straight into fortified barricades.

1:28:57 The casualties were catastrophic.

1:28:59 Whitelocke signed a total capitulation and evacuated the region entirely.

1:29:06 In the Indian Ocean, French privateers operating from the Mascarene

1:29:11 Islands were bleeding British commercial shipping dry.

1:29:14 Lord Minto, the Governor-General of India,

1:29:17 launched an amphibious invasion in 1810.

1:29:21 British and Indian sepoy forces overwhelmed

1:29:24 the French garrison on the Isle de France, renamed the island Mauritius,

1:29:29 and turned their attention to the Dutch East Indies.

1:29:32 The following year, a massive armada landed on Java.

1:29:36 British forces stormed the fortified Dutch encampment

1:29:40 at Meester Cornelis in brutal hand-to-hand fighting.

1:29:44 The capture of Java cemented British

1:29:46 dominance across the entire Eastern Hemisphere.

1:29:51 And then there was Spain's collapsing empire in the Americas.

1:29:55 When Madrid fell into political chaos,

1:29:58 local elites across the colonies refused to recognize Joseph Bonaparte.

1:30:04 Independent juntas sprang up in Caracas, Buenos Aires, and Bogota.

1:30:10 What started as movements loyal to the deposed

1:30:13 Ferdinand VII soon radicalized into full wars of independence.

1:30:18 In Mexico, the radical priest Miguel Hidalgo issued

1:30:23 the Grito de Dolores in September of 1810,

1:30:26 triggering a massive peasant uprising.

1:30:29 Tens of thousands of indigenous and mestizo insurgents marched

1:30:33 on Mexico City armed with machetes and farming tools.

1:30:39 In South America, Simon Bolivar launched his legendary Admirable Campaign,

1:30:45 crossing the freezing Andes to liberate Venezuela.

1:30:48 He declared a war to the death, decreeing that any Spaniard who did

1:30:53 not actively support independence would be executed.

1:30:59 These were not side shows.

1:31:01 The decisions made in the palaces of Paris

1:31:04 and London dictated the survival of ancient dynasties in Tehran,

1:31:09 the shifting borders of the Balkans, the control of the Javanese spice trade,

1:31:14 and the violent emergence of new republics across the Western Hemisphere.

1:31:19 The wealth extracted from all of these far-flung

1:31:22 territories poured back into the British war machine,

1:31:26 funding the subsidies that kept France's enemies armed and fighting.

1:31:30 And for every French victory on the continent,

1:31:33 that ocean of foreign capital ensured it remained temporary,

1:31:37 forcing Paris to demand ever more from an already exhausted population.

1:31:47 Chapter 11, the zenith and the cracks.

1:31:53 By 1809, the strain of holding an empire together

1:31:57 by force of will and cannon fire had begun to show.

1:32:01 Austria, humiliated in previous wars and stripped of territory,

1:32:06 had spent the intervening years quietly rebuilding.

1:32:11 Archduke Charles modernized the army from top to bottom,

1:32:14 adopting the French core system,

1:32:16 expanding his artillery, and stoking something new among his soldiers,

1:32:21 a genuine sense of German national pride.

1:32:24 When the moment came, the Austrians struck hard and fast,

1:32:28 pouring troops into Bavaria while the bulk of France's

1:32:31 veteran forces were tangled up fighting guerrillas across Spain.

1:32:37 The army that scrambled to respond was a changed thing.

1:32:41 Teenage conscripts filled its ranks alongside vast contingents

1:32:46 of allied troops drawn from the Confederation of the Rhine.

1:32:50 These were capable soldiers, many of them,

1:32:53 but the force that had swept across Europe just a few years earlier

1:32:57 had been reshaped in ways that would matter on the battlefield, and it showed.

1:33:04 In the Tyrolean Alps,

1:33:06 a spontaneous uprising erupted against the French-backed Bavarian authorities.

1:33:11 It was led by an innkeeper named Andreas Hofer,

1:33:15 a charismatic figure who rallied deeply conservative mountain communities

1:33:20 enraged by secular French laws and Bavarian conscription quotas.

1:33:25 The Tyroleans fought with devastating improvisation.

1:33:28 They ambushed columns in narrow Alpine passes,

1:33:31 sending boulders and timber crashing down

1:33:33 cliff faces onto the soldiers trapped below.

1:33:37 It was ugly, effective, and impossible to stamp out quickly.

1:33:43 Meanwhile, the main French army pushed east along the Danube

1:33:47 Valley and captured Vienna for the second time in 4 years.

1:33:51 The city offered little resistance.

1:33:54 But crossing the river proved far more dangerous than taking the capital.

1:33:59 Hastily built pontoon bridges carried the French vanguard

1:34:02 to the northern bank near the villages of Aspern and Essling.

1:34:06 Then the Austrians sent heavy barges loaded

1:34:09 with stones downstream to smash the bridges apart,

1:34:13 stranding the advance force against the water with no way back.

1:34:19 What followed was the first major personal defeat of the emperor's career.

1:34:23 For two full days, French infantry fought

1:34:27 house to house under point-blank artillery fire.

1:34:30 When they finally withdrew back across the river,

1:34:33 they left behind thousands of dead and wounded.

1:34:37 Among the casualties was Marshal Lannes, one of Napoleon's oldest companions.

1:34:42 A cannonball shattered both his legs,

1:34:45 and he died days later in agonizing delirium.

1:34:49 The loss hit the high command hard.

1:34:54 The French retreated to the island of Lobau,

1:34:57 sitting in the middle of the Danube,

1:34:59 and spent 6 weeks turning it into a fortified staging ground.

1:35:03 Engineers drove bridge supports deep into the riverbed,

1:35:07 building crossings sturdy enough to carry the entire army at once.

1:35:11 There would be no repeat of the disaster at Aspern.

1:35:16 The Battle of Wagram, fought in July of that year, involved over 300,000 men.

1:35:22 It was the largest engagement in European history up to that point.

1:35:26 The French deployed a grand battery of more than 100 cannons,

1:35:31 hammering the Austrian center with continuous fire

1:35:34 that blanketed the plains in choking smoke.

1:35:38 To break the line, General Macdonald formed 8,000 men into a colossal

1:35:43 hollow square and marched them straight into a crossfire of canister shot.

1:35:49 The formation was torn to pieces.

1:35:52 Bodies piled thick along the path of advance,

1:35:56 but the sheer weight of the column punched through, and the Austrians fell back.

1:36:03 The peace that followed was punishing.

1:36:06 Austria lost 3 million subjects, paid an enormous indemnity,

1:36:11 and surrendered all access to the Adriatic Sea.

1:36:15 The harshness of it guaranteed that Austrian resentment would fester,

1:36:19 and that Vienna would rejoin any

1:36:21 coalition the instant French power looked vulnerable.

1:36:26 The bloodshed at Aspern-Essling,

1:36:28 combined with assassination plots back in Paris,

1:36:32 had sharpened one question in Napoleon's mind.

1:36:35 He needed an heir.

1:36:38 The decision to divorce Josephine was cold and entirely political.

1:36:43 She was in her late 40s and had not

1:36:45 produced a child during their 14 turbulent years of marriage.

1:36:49 In December 1809, in the grand cabinet of the Tuileries,

1:36:54 she read a prepared statement of devotion to the state,

1:36:57 then collapsed into sobs and had to be carried from the room.

1:37:00 Napoleon wept openly.

1:37:03 He told those present that France's political destiny demanded the sacrifice.

1:37:10 He married the 18-year-old Archduchess Marie Louise of Austria,

1:37:15 daughter of the emperor he had just defeated.

1:37:18 Among the old revolutionary veterans, the union was deeply unpopular.

1:37:23 She was the niece of Marie Antoinette.

1:37:26 When a son was born in March 1811, a 101-gun salute echoed across Paris,

1:37:33 and an extravagant silver-gilt cradle was presented to the infant.

1:37:38 The dynasty, it seemed, was secured.

1:37:42 Beneath the celebrations, though, the empire was fracturing.

1:37:46 The demand for fresh troops never let up.

1:37:49 Armed flying columns scoured the countryside hunting draft

1:37:53 dodgers who had fled into forests to avoid conscription.

1:37:58 Villages lost their young men systematically,

1:38:01 leaving the fields to women and the elderly.

1:38:04 Some conscripts chopped off their own trigger fingers.

1:38:07 Others knocked out their front teeth so they couldn't bite

1:38:09 open the paper musket cartridges required to load a weapon.

1:38:15 When the flying columns found a fugitive's family,

1:38:18 they quartered soldiers in the home, consumed the winter food stores,

1:38:22 and imposed ruinous daily fines until the hiding son finally surrendered.

1:38:28 The system worked in the sense that it produced soldiers.

1:38:32 What it also produced was hatred.

1:38:37 The Continental System was already strangling the empire's own commercial hubs.

1:38:42 The taxation needed to sustain a standing army

1:38:45 of over a million men drained satellite kingdoms dry.

1:38:49 And in Russia, the alliance forged

1:38:52 on that famous raft at Tilsit was falling apart.

1:38:56 Tsar Alexander viewed the French-controlled Duchy of Warsaw

1:38:59 as a direct military threat to his borders.

1:39:03 In December 1810, he abandoned the Continental System entirely,

1:39:09 opening Russian ports to neutral ships carrying British

1:39:12 goods and slapping punitive tariffs on French luxury imports.

1:39:18 The economic defiance struck at the heart of French grand strategy.

1:39:23 Negotiation was over.

1:39:25 What came next would require every young man, every horse,

1:39:29 and every sack of grain the empire could muster.

1:39:38 Chapter 12, the march on Moscow.

1:39:43 In the spring of 1812,

1:39:45 something extraordinary gathered along the rivers and roads of Eastern Europe.

1:39:50 Over 600,000 soldiers, drawn from virtually every corner of the continent,

1:39:56 assembled into what was the largest army the world had ever seen.

1:40:00 Italians, Poles, Germans, Swiss, and French marched alongside one another

1:40:07 in a sprawling multilingual column that stretched for miles.

1:40:12 200,000 horses pulled the cavalry, the artillery,

1:40:18 and the enormous, cumbersome supply wagons.

1:40:21 Polish lancers rode with hopes of winning a free homeland.

1:40:26 Bavarian conscripts trudged forward with dread,

1:40:29 dragged far from families to fight in a war they barely understood.

1:40:35 The preparations had been exhaustive.

1:40:37 Millions of rations were stockpiled in fortified depots along the Vistula River,

1:40:42 loaded onto heavy wagons meant to follow the army east.

1:40:46 And yet, the plan was flawed from the start.

1:40:50 The distances involved, over 800 km from the border to Moscow,

1:40:55 far exceeded what early 19th century transport could manage.

1:40:59 The roads of Eastern Europe were unpaved dirt tracks,

1:41:04 and the iron-rimmed wagons sank into them almost immediately.

1:41:08 The supply lines broke down within days of the campaign's opening.

1:41:13 The army crossed the Neman River in late June,

1:41:17 entering Russian territory without a formal declaration of war.

1:41:22 As Napoleon approached the riverbank,

1:41:24 his horse stumbled and threw him to the ground.

1:41:27 Someone on the general staff muttered, "That's a bad omen.

1:41:31 A Roman would recross the river." The column pressed on regardless,

1:41:36 flowing across three heavy pontoon bridges into the vast interior.

1:41:43 The Russian high command knew they were

1:41:45 vastly outnumbered and chose to fall back.

1:41:48 They retreated deep into their own territory,

1:41:51 ordering a scorched-earth policy as they went.

1:41:54 Crops, livestock, shelter, anything of use was to be destroyed.

1:41:59 The aim was simple, deny the French everything.

1:42:02 But the cost of that strategy fell on the people who could bear it least.

1:42:07 Russian serfs, living at subsistence level,

1:42:11 watched as imperial officers and Cossack

1:42:14 detachments arrived to burn their autumn harvests.

1:42:18 For many, losing that grain meant starvation come winter.

1:42:23 Some communities fought back, clashing with their own army in desperate

1:42:28 skirmishes to protect what little they had.

1:42:31 In the end, the Russian state torched its own

1:42:34 countryside far more thoroughly than the French vanguard ever managed,

1:42:38 creating a wasteland of starving civilians long before the invaders arrived.

1:42:45 The retreat caused fury within the Russian officer corps.

1:42:49 Barclay de Tolly, the Minister of War,

1:42:52 orchestrated the withdrawal with cold discipline.

1:42:55 But commanders like Prince Bagration viewed the constant

1:42:59 surrender of Russian soil as a profound humiliation.

1:43:04 He raged openly against his superiors, demanding a chance to stand and fight.

1:43:10 The ordinary soldiers felt much the same,

1:43:12 marching eastward in simmering confusion,

1:43:15 unable to understand why they were giving their country away without a battle.

1:43:21 Meanwhile, the heat of the Russian summer

1:43:23 was already destroying the Grande Armée from within.

1:43:27 Sudden thunderstorms turned the dirt roads into knee-deep swamps,

1:43:32 halting the wagons and forcing thirsty

1:43:34 soldiers to drink from stagnant, infected puddles.

1:43:39 Typhus and dysentery swept through the tightly packed columns,

1:43:43 killing tens of thousands of men before they had fired a single shot.

1:43:49 Within the first month, over 80,000 horses died of starvation and exhaustion,

1:43:55 their bloated bodies lining the route.

1:43:58 Without light cavalry, the French lost their ability to scout Russian

1:44:01 positions or forage for food in the surrounding countryside.

1:44:06 The army was going blind.

1:44:09 The first major clash came at Smolensk in August.

1:44:13 The Russians fortified the city's massive

1:44:16 medieval walls and repelled repeated French assaults.

1:44:21 Artillery bombardment ignited the wooden buildings inside,

1:44:25 turning the city into a raging inferno.

1:44:28 Then, under cover of night, the Russian army slipped away,

1:44:33 leaving the French to occupy a smoldering ruin.

1:44:37 Charred civilian corpses lay in the streets.

1:44:40 Survivors picked through the wreckage of their homes.

1:44:45 The loss of Smolensk pushed morale to a breaking point,

1:44:48 and Tsar Alexander finally intervened.

1:44:52 He appointed General Kutuzov to overall command,

1:44:55 a veteran respected enough to hold the fractured officer corps together.

1:44:59 Kutuzov halted the retreat at a small village called Borodino,

1:45:04 120 km west of Moscow, and ordered the construction of massive earthen

1:45:10 fortifications packed with hundreds of artillery pieces.

1:45:15 The battle, on the 7th of September, was a brutal frontal slugfest.

1:45:21 French infantry walked directly into Russian cannon fire,

1:45:25 sustaining horrific casualties just to reach the base of the earthworks.

1:45:30 Inside the redoubts, the fighting became hand-to-hand bayonets,

1:45:34 clubbed muskets, bare fists.

1:45:36 The positions changed hands again and again throughout the day.

1:45:40 Napoleon's marshals begged him to commit

1:45:43 the Imperial Guard and finish the thing.

1:45:46 He refused.

1:45:47 "At 800 leagues from France,

1:45:50 I will not have my guard destroyed." The decision allowed

1:45:53 the battered Russian army to withdraw in good order under darkness.

1:45:58 Over 70,000 men lay dead or wounded on the field.

1:46:02 Thousands more, lacking medical supplies,

1:46:05 were left to die on the freezing open ground.

1:46:09 The French entered Moscow on the 14th of September,

1:46:13 expecting a formal surrender.

1:46:15 They found a ghost city.

1:46:17 The governor had ordered the population evacuated and released criminals

1:46:21 from the prisons with incendiary devices and orders to burn it all.

1:46:26 Fires broke out almost immediately, fanned by high winds,

1:46:30 raging for 4 days and consuming 4/5 of the city.

1:46:35 French soldiers looted the burning mansions,

1:46:39 stumbling through smoke and stolen silk gowns,

1:46:42 clutching silver plates, still desperately short of bread.

1:46:48 Napoleon lingered in the ashes for 5 weeks,

1:46:51 waiting for the Tsar to sue for peace.

1:46:55 Alexander ignored every message.

1:46:58 He knew the winter was coming.

1:47:01 The first heavy snow fell in mid-October.

1:47:04 The army would starve if it stayed.

1:47:09 The retreat began on the 19th of October,

1:47:12 the column burdened with looted treasure

1:47:14 and thousands of civilian camp followers.

1:47:17 Russian forces blocked the southern route at Maloyaroslavets,

1:47:21 pushing the French back along the same

1:47:23 devastated road they had marched in summer.

1:47:26 There was nothing left to eat.

1:47:28 Temperatures dropped to minus 30.

1:47:31 Men without winter clothing wrapped themselves

1:47:34 in stolen carpets and raw animal skins.

1:47:38 Frostbite claimed fingers and noses.

1:47:41 Starving soldiers ate their dying horses raw.

1:47:45 Cossack cavalry and partisan bands harassed the flanks constantly,

1:47:49 cutting down anyone who fell behind.

1:47:52 Entire regiments of Italian and German

1:47:55 conscripts dropped dead in the snowdrifts, thousands of kilometers from home.

1:48:02 In early December, reading reports of a coup attempt back in Paris,

1:48:06 Napoleon handed command to Marshal Murat and slipped away in a fast sleigh,

1:48:11 traveling incognito across hostile German territory.

1:48:15 He left his dying army behind to secure his political grip on the capital.

1:48:22 The final agony came at the Berezina River in late November.

1:48:26 Russian armies closed in from three directions,

1:48:29 trapping the remnants against the western bank.

1:48:32 Dutch engineers under General Eblé worked chest-deep in the freezing water,

1:48:37 wrestling wooden trestles into the current to build two fragile bridges.

1:48:43 Nearly all of them died of hypothermia afterward.

1:48:46 When Russian artillery began dropping shells into the mass

1:48:49 of stragglers waiting to cross, panic erupted.

1:48:53 Thousands were trampled to death or drowned in the ice-choked river.

1:48:58 The core of the army escaped, but the Grande Armée was finished.

1:49:03 Hundreds of thousands of dead lay scattered across the snow behind them.

1:49:09 Across the Atlantic, the same economic warfare that had driven

1:49:13 the army into Russia was igniting a second conflict.

1:49:17 The Continental System and the British Orders

1:49:19 in Council had strangled neutral American shipping for years.

1:49:24 Infuriated by the seizure of their vessels and the impressment of their sailors,

1:49:29 the United States declared war on Britain

1:49:31 and launched a disastrously uncoordinated invasion of Canada.

1:49:36 The war featured surprising American naval victories in single ship engagements,

1:49:41 proof that the policies shaping the catastrophe in Russia

1:49:44 had dragged a distant continent into the same widening fire.

1:49:50 The destruction of the Grande Armée shattered

1:49:52 the spell that had held Europe in submission.

1:49:56 Half a million men were gone.

1:49:58 The imperial center lay exposed.

1:50:01 Across the continent, former allies sensed the weakness,

1:50:05 broke their treaties, and began to mobilize.

1:50:09 The survivors, limping back across the Rhine, would find no rest.

1:50:15 A unified coalition was already forming behind them, armed and determined,

1:50:20 ready to drive them all the way back to Paris.

1:50:29 Chapter 13, The Battle of the Nations.

1:50:35 The news from Russia arrived in fragments.

1:50:38 Rumors at first, then dispatches,

1:50:41 then the hollow faces of survivors trudging westward through the German snow.

1:50:46 The Grande Armée, that vast instrument of imperial will,

1:50:51 had been swallowed whole by the Russian winter.

1:50:54 And across Central Europe,

1:50:56 people began to sense that something fundamental had shifted.

1:51:00 In December of 1812, General Yorck von Wartenburg,

1:51:05 commanding the Prussian Corps that had

1:51:06 been forced to march alongside the French, signed the Convention of Tauroggen.

1:51:12 His troops would fight no more for Paris.

1:51:15 It was a spontaneous act of defiance,

1:51:18 and it lit a fuse that ran straight through the German heartland.

1:51:23 Prussia formalized the break in February of 1813,

1:51:28 signing the Treaty of Kalisz with Russia

1:51:30 and pledging 80,000 soldiers to the cause.

1:51:34 King Frederick William III issued his proclamation and mine folk,

1:51:39 calling directly upon the people to rise in a war of national liberation.

1:51:44 He introduced the Iron Cross,

1:51:47 a military honor awarded regardless of social class.

1:51:51 The Sixth Coalition had its core.

1:51:54 And back in Paris, the imperial administration scrambled.

1:51:59 The desperation was total.

1:52:02 Depots were stripped bare.

1:52:04 The conscription classes of 1814 were called up a full year early.

1:52:09 These raw recruits, many of them teenagers, were nicknamed the Marie Louises,

1:52:16 after the Empress who signed the decrees that sent them to war.

1:52:20 They arrived at the German front lacking uniforms, horses, and basic training.

1:52:26 The army that had once been the most feared professional

1:52:29 fighting force in Europe now looked like something else entirely.

1:52:35 Even so, the French managed hard-fought

1:52:38 victories at Lützen and Bautzen that May,

1:52:41 but without enough cavalry to pursue the retreating Russo-Prussian forces,

1:52:45 those wins led nowhere.

1:52:48 The enemy fell back in good order, preserved their strength, and waited.

1:52:53 Both sides were bleeding badly.

1:52:55 A summer armistice was agreed.

1:52:58 It would prove to be a fatal pause,

1:53:01 because during those weeks of quiet, Austria made up its mind.

1:53:07 The decisive moment came in Dresden, inside the Marcolini Palace,

1:53:11 where the emperor met the Austrian Foreign

1:53:13 Minister Klemens von Metternich for nine volatile hours.

1:53:17 Metternich laid out his terms.

1:53:20 Dismantle the Grand Empire.

1:53:23 Return France to its natural borders.

1:53:26 The emperor refused with fury, reportedly hurling his hat to the ground.

1:53:31 "I know how to die," he said, "but I will not yield an inch of territory."

1:53:38 Metternich left the room with a quiet certainty.

1:53:41 "You are lost, sire," he told him.

1:53:44 Austria joined the coalition.

1:53:46 The allied force now numbered over 800,000 men,

1:53:51 operating under the Trachenberg Plan,

1:53:53 a coordinated strategy designed to avoid engaging the emperor

1:53:57 directly while picking off his isolated marshals one by one.

1:54:03 It all came to a head in October of 1813, outside the Saxon city of Leipzig.

1:54:10 Over half a million soldiers converged on a single area,

1:54:15 along with thousands of artillery pieces.

1:54:18 The engagement lasted three days.

1:54:21 Russian, Prussian, Austrian,

1:54:22 and Swedish armies pressed inward from every direction,

1:54:26 grinding the outnumbered French into a shrinking perimeter.

1:54:30 The artillery bombardment shook the ground for miles.

1:54:34 Black powder smoke hung so thick over the field

1:54:38 that men could barely see the ranks beside them.

1:54:41 And then the Saxon allies mutinied,

1:54:44 turning their cannons on the French and firing

1:54:48 point-blank into the lines of their former comrades.

1:54:53 The retreat through Leipzig's narrow streets turned into catastrophe.

1:54:58 A terrified corporal prematurely blew the only

1:55:01 stone bridge over the swollen Elster River.

1:55:04 30,000 French soldiers were trapped on the wrong bank.

1:55:08 Men threw themselves into the freezing water under Russian sniper fire.

1:55:14 Marshal Poniatowski, who had received his marshal's baton just days earlier,

1:55:19 drowned in the current.

1:55:22 What remained of the army limped back across the Rhine,

1:55:26 carrying typhus into mainland France, and abandoning everything east of it.

1:55:31 The German states, the Confederation of the Rhine,

1:55:35 the Dutch territories, all gone.

1:55:38 By early 1814, nearly 400,000 allied soldiers had crossed the French frontier,

1:55:46 marching on Paris from multiple directions.

1:55:50 And here, fighting on his own soil, the emperor produced something remarkable.

1:55:58 During the Six Days Campaign in February, he maneuvered a force of just 30,000

1:56:03 men to win four distinct engagements at Champaubert,

1:56:07 Montmirail, Château-Thierry, and Vauchamps,

1:56:11 effectively destroying the vanguard of Blücher's Prussian army.

1:56:15 It was brilliant, mobile, furious generalship, but it changed nothing.

1:56:22 The coalition simply went around him and marched on the undefended capital.

1:56:27 Marshal Marmont, commanding the Paris garrison,

1:56:30 negotiated a secret capitulation and marched

1:56:34 his entire corps into Austrian lines.

1:56:38 At Fontainebleau, the senior marshals blocked his path.

1:56:42 Michel Ney told him plainly that the army would not march on Paris.

1:56:47 It would obey its generals.

1:56:49 The emperor drafted his abdication,

1:56:52 first trying to preserve the throne for his infant son,

1:56:55 then surrendering unconditionally when the allies refused.

1:57:00 That night, alone, he swallowed a vial of poison he had carried since Russia.

1:57:06 The mixture had degraded over time.

1:57:09 It made him violently sick, but did not kill him.

1:57:13 He survived and was made to face what came next.

1:57:23 Chapter 14, The Hundred Days.

1:57:28 The island of Elba sits between Corsica and the Italian mainland,

1:57:32 a rugged, sun-baked place, home to around 12,000 people.

1:57:37 It was here that the deposed emperor was granted

1:57:40 sovereignty under the terms of the Treaty of Fontainebleau.

1:57:44 He arrived aboard the British frigate HMS Undaunted in May of 1814,

1:57:50 and immediately set about governing the island with the same

1:57:54 frantic energy he had once applied to an entire continent.

1:57:59 He designed new roads, expanded iron ore mines, reformed agricultural taxes.

1:58:06 It was as though the habits of empire could not be switched off,

1:58:09 even when the empire had shrunk to a speck in the Mediterranean.

1:58:15 The whole setup was a strange miniature replica of what he'd built before.

1:58:20 There was a tiny royal court, a personal guard of 600 veteran soldiers

1:58:25 who had followed him voluntarily into exile,

1:58:28 and a naval fleet consisting of a single brig called the Inconstant.

1:58:33 His mother, Letizia, and his sister, Pauline,

1:58:36 came to keep him company and help with money, which he badly needed.

1:58:41 The restored French government had promised him a pension of 2 million francs.

1:58:46 They never paid it.

1:58:48 The little administration teetered on the edge

1:58:50 of bankruptcy almost from the start.

1:58:55 Meanwhile, secret couriers brought him a steady

1:58:58 stream of reports from the mainland.

1:59:00 The news was extraordinary.

1:59:03 King Louis XVIII, who had returned to Paris in what

1:59:07 many described as the baggage train of the allies, was deeply unpopular.

1:59:12 The Bourbon government had retired thousands of veteran officers on half pay,

1:59:18 replaced the tricolor with the old white flag,

1:59:22 and made noises about returning confiscated lands

1:59:25 to aristocratic emigres who had fled during the revolution.

1:59:29 25 years of social progress felt suddenly under threat.

1:59:34 The army was furious.

1:59:36 The countryside was restless.

1:59:39 And on Elba, the exile was paying very close attention.

1:59:45 He also learned that the Congress of Vienna was

1:59:48 discussing whether to move him somewhere far more remote,

1:59:51 somewhere deep in the Atlantic, beyond any hope of return.

1:59:55 That was the final push.

1:59:57 A secret departure was planned for late February of 1815.

2:00:02 He waited until the British guard ship was temporarily absent, and then,

2:00:06 under cover of darkness,

2:00:08 the small flotilla slipped out of the harbor at Portoferraio.

2:00:12 Just over a thousand armed men sailed with him.

2:00:16 They landed completely unopposed on the southern French coast at Gulf-Juan.

2:00:24 The column moved quickly northward through snow-covered Alpine passes,

2:00:29 deliberately avoiding royalist strongholds in the Rhone Valley,

2:00:33 and sticking to the working-class regions of the Dauphiné,

2:00:37 where sympathy ran high.

2:00:40 The moment that defined everything came just

2:00:43 south of Grenoble at the village of Laffrey.

2:00:46 A battalion of the fifth line infantry had been deployed

2:00:49 across the road with orders to shoot him on sight.

2:00:53 He walked out ahead of his own guards,

2:00:55 entirely alone, straight toward the leveled muskets.

2:01:00 He opened his gray overcoat and called out,

2:01:03 "Soldiers of the fifth, do you recognize me?

2:01:07 If there is any among you who would kill his emperor,

2:01:09 here I am." The line broke.

2:01:12 Soldiers wept, rushed forward, and embraced his boots, shouting,

2:01:17 "Vive l'Empereur!" After Laffrey,

2:01:22 the march on Paris became a bloodless procession.

2:01:25 Thousands of soldiers deserted the Bourbon

2:01:28 cause and joined the advancing column.

2:01:31 Cheering peasants lined the roads through every town.

2:01:35 Marshal Ney, who had personally sworn to Louis XVIII

2:01:39 that he would bring the usurper back in an iron cage,

2:01:43 defected with his entire command.

2:01:46 The king fled the Tuileries Palace in the middle

2:01:49 of the night and crossed into Belgium.

2:01:52 And so, without a single shot fired,

2:01:55 the returning emperor was carried up the grand staircase

2:01:58 of the palace by a mob of hysterical supporters.

2:02:02 He had reclaimed the seat of power.

2:02:05 The desperate, fragile period known as the Hundred Days had begun.

2:02:12 The response from the powers assembled at the Congress of Vienna was immediate.

2:02:17 On the 13th of March, 1815,

2:02:21 they issued a joint declaration that was unprecedented in international law.

2:02:26 He was proclaimed an outlaw,

2:02:30 outside the protection of civil and social relations,

2:02:33 an enemy and disturber of the tranquility of the world

2:02:37 who had rendered himself liable to public vengeance.

2:02:40 Over 700,000 allied troops began to mobilize.

2:02:46 To survive, he had to strike before they could converge.

2:02:50 The newly formed Army of the North

2:02:53 advanced rapidly across the Sambre River into Belgium,

2:02:57 aiming to split the Anglo-Dutch army under

2:03:00 Wellington from the Prussian army under Blücher.

2:03:03 The initial maneuvers caught the coalition off guard.

2:03:07 On the 16th of June, he struck the isolated Prussians at Ligny,

2:03:12 a brutal, concentrated infantry fight in the burning streets of a small village.

2:03:18 The French won.

2:03:19 But the victory was undercut by Marshal Ney's

2:03:22 failure at the simultaneous Battle of Quatre Bras,

2:03:26 where he didn't secure the vital crossroads

2:03:29 and allowed Wellington to withdraw in good order.

2:03:33 A torrential rainstorm on the 17th turned the Belgian

2:03:37 countryside into a deep quagmire and slowed the French pursuit.

2:03:42 Wellington used the delay to dig in along the ridge of Mont Saint Jean,

2:03:47 anchoring his flanks on the fortified

2:03:50 farmhouses of Hougoumont and La Haye Sainte.

2:03:53 The Battle of Waterloo opened late on the morning of the 18th,

2:03:57 delayed so the ground could dry enough for French artillery.

2:04:02 The assault on Hougoumont, intended as a diversion,

2:04:06 escalated into a grinding slaughter that swallowed entire

2:04:10 French units without breaking the British right flank.

2:04:14 Then Ney, misreading the movement of British casualties as a retreat,

2:04:19 sent the heavy cavalry charging unsupported up

2:04:22 the muddy slope against unbroken infantry squares.

2:04:26 The cuirassiers went again and again.

2:04:31 The [clears throat] British bayonets held.

2:04:35 Late in the afternoon, the Prussians emerged from the woods to the east

2:04:39 and struck the exposed French right at Plancenoit.

2:04:44 It was the decisive blow.

2:04:46 In desperation, the legendary Old Guard was

2:04:49 committed in a final assault on Wellington's center.

2:04:52 Point-blank musketry shattered it.

2:04:55 Panic spread through the French lines like fire through dry grass,

2:04:59 and the Army of the North dissolved into a fleeing

2:05:02 mob on the muddy slopes of Mont Saint Jean.

2:05:07 The political gamble of the Hundred Days died on that field.

2:05:11 He fled back to Paris, where the legislative chambers turned openly hostile.

2:05:17 A second abdication followed.

2:05:20 Then, a desperate dash to the Atlantic coast

2:05:23 with Prussian cavalry units closing in behind him.

2:05:26 At Rochefort, every escape route was severed by the Royal Navy blockade.

2:05:31 There was nothing left to do.

2:05:33 He surrendered on the deck of a British warship,

2:05:36 formally and finally removed from the board.

2:05:40 The powers who had spent over two decades

2:05:43 fighting him could at last begin to rebuild.

2:05:52 Chapter 15, the world rebuilt.

2:05:58 The formal surrender took place on the deck

2:06:00 of HMS Bellerophon on the 15th of July, 1815.

2:06:05 The deposed emperor handed himself over to Captain Frederick Maitland,

2:06:10 apparently expecting political asylum somewhere in the English countryside,

2:06:15 a quiet estate, perhaps, a gentleman's retirement.

2:06:19 The British government had other ideas.

2:06:22 They were terrified of his political influence, even now, even in defeat.

2:06:27 They refused to recognize his imperial title.

2:06:31 The ship was ordered to remain anchored offshore

2:06:33 while they decided what to do with him.

2:06:37 The decision, when it came, was brutally pragmatic.

2:06:41 He would be exiled to the most remote, most inescapable place on Earth.

2:06:48 He was transferred to HMS Northumberland and transported

2:06:51 across the island to the island of Saint Helena,

2:06:54 a desolate volcanic rock jutting from the South Atlantic,

2:06:58 over 1,900 km from the nearest point

2:07:01 on the African coast and ringed by British artillery batteries.

2:07:06 There would be no escape from this one.

2:07:10 His designated residence was Longwood House,

2:07:14 a former summer retreat for the East India Company,

2:07:17 perched on a damp, wind-blasted plateau.

2:07:20 The conditions were genuinely miserable.

2:07:24 Rats infested the building.

2:07:26 The floorboards rotted from the constant damp.

2:07:30 A thick, depressing fog routinely settled over the grounds,

2:07:35 and the health of his entire

2:07:36 French entourage deteriorated steadily in the gloom.

2:07:41 It was the kind of place that seemed designed to make a person shrink.

2:07:46 The relationship between the captive and the island's British governor,

2:07:50 Sir Hudson Lowe, collapsed almost immediately into a petty,

2:07:54 vindictive, psychological war.

2:07:57 Lowe rationed the household's firewood and wine.

2:08:00 He posted armed sentries outside the windows at night.

2:08:04 He refused to deliver any mail addressed to the emperor,

2:08:08 insisting on the designation General Bonaparte.

2:08:11 These were small, deliberate humiliations,

2:08:14 administered with bureaucratic precision,

2:08:17 and they ground on day after day, year after year, in the fog.

2:08:25 Stripped of all political power, the exile turned his immense,

2:08:30 restless energy toward something he could still control, his legacy.

2:08:36 Working closely with the devoted Emmanuel de Las Cases,

2:08:40 he dictated what would become the Memorial de Sainte-Hélène,

2:08:44 a massive text in which he carefully presented himself as a liberal martyr.

2:08:50 In this version of events,

2:08:52 his wars had all been defensive, fought against oppressive monarchies,

2:08:56 waged to spread the progressive ideals

2:08:59 of the French Revolution across a backward continent.

2:09:03 It was, of course, a selective reading of history, but it was a compelling one.

2:09:09 And it would prove enormously influential.

2:09:13 His physical decline was rapid.

2:09:16 Severe abdominal pain, constant vomiting,

2:09:20 a noticeable, alarming loss of body weight.

2:09:24 He died on the 5th of May, 1821, at the age of 51.

2:09:29 The subsequent British autopsy revealed a massive,

2:09:33 perforated ulcer in his stomach.

2:09:36 Stomach cancer.

2:09:37 The same disease that had killed his father.

2:09:41 The finding permanently dispelled the persistent

2:09:45 rumors of arsenic poisoning by the British,

2:09:47 though those rumors would linger in certain circles for generations.

2:09:53 What happened next was unexpected.

2:09:56 The British military garrison on the island,

2:09:59 men who had spent their adult lives fighting against his armies

2:10:02 across the mountains of Spain and the muddy fields of Belgium,

2:10:06 filed past the small camp bed in solemn procession to view his body.

2:10:12 Many of them wept openly.

2:10:14 The sheer physical reality of the pale, emaciated corpse dissolved something.

2:10:20 The terrifying, mythological monster of decades

2:10:24 of British wartime propaganda simply wasn't there anymore.

2:10:29 Just a dead man on a bed.

2:10:31 There was an immense, heavy sense of finality among the ranks.

2:10:37 He was dressed in the iconic green uniform

2:10:40 of the Chasseursà Cheval of the Imperial Guard.

2:10:43 The crimson ribbon of the Legion of Honor pinned in place.

2:10:47 Four nested coffins, tin, lead, mahogany, sealed the body.

2:10:53 British grenadiers carried him in relays to a quiet,

2:10:56 willow-shaded valley on the island with full military honors.

2:11:01 Even in death, the arguments continued.

2:11:04 The British governor insisted the tombstone read Napoleon Bonaparte.

2:11:10 The French entourage demanded the singular imperial Napoleon.

2:11:16 Neither side would yield.

2:11:18 And so the heavy stone slab that covered

2:11:20 the muddy grave was left completely blank.

2:11:25 While the captive had been slowly dying in the South Atlantic,

2:11:29 the victorious powers of Europe had already convened the Congress of Vienna.

2:11:34 Their task was enormous.

2:11:37 They had to redraw the map of a continent

2:11:40 that had been ripped apart over 20 years of continuous warfare.

2:11:45 The negotiations were dominated by four figures,

2:11:47 the conservative Austrian foreign minister Klemens von Metternich,

2:11:51 the pragmatic British foreign secretary Viscount Castlereagh,

2:11:55 the deeply mystical Tsar Alexander I of Russia,

2:11:59 and the brilliant, slippery French diplomat Talleyrand.

2:12:05 Talleyrand's performance was remarkable.

2:12:08 Representing a defeated, occupied nation,

2:12:11 he exploited the growing divisions between the victors

2:12:14 over the fate of Poland and Saxony.

2:12:17 He positioned France as the defender of smaller, vulnerable nations.

2:12:22 He maneuvered the restored Bourbon monarchy back

2:12:25 into the inner circle of great power decision-making.

2:12:29 It was diplomatic manipulation of the highest order,

2:12:32 and the overriding objective of the Congress,

2:12:34 shared by all parties, was the restoration of the old balance of power.

2:12:40 They wanted a conservative international system built to suppress

2:12:44 any future democratic revolution anywhere at any cost.

2:12:51 France was pushed back to its borders of 1790,

2:12:55 forced to pay a crippling financial indemnity,

2:12:58 and saddled with the deeply unpopular Bourbon monarchy under King Louis XVIII.

2:13:03 To contain future French aggression,

2:13:05 the Congress built strong buffer states along the borders.

2:13:09 Belgium and Holland were merged into the United Kingdom of the Netherlands.

2:13:14 Prussia received massive new territories in the industrial Rhineland.

2:13:19 Austria regained its dominance over the Italian peninsula,

2:13:23 erasing the modern republics that had

2:13:25 been established over the previous two decades,

2:13:28 and returning the region to a patchwork

2:13:30 of conservative duchies ruled by Habsburg cousins.

2:13:36 The Congress formally established the Concert of Europe,

2:13:40 an unprecedented system of regular

2:13:42 international congresses and mutual military guarantees.

2:13:47 The major powers agreed to intervene across

2:13:49 borders to crush liberal uprisings wherever they occurred.

2:13:53 Monarchical stability came first.

2:13:56 National self-determination came nowhere.

2:14:00 This deeply conservative system would successfully prevent

2:14:04 another continent-wide war for exactly 100 years,

2:14:08 holding the line until the catastrophic outbreak of the First World War in 1914.

2:14:16 The cost of the previous two decades was staggering.

2:14:20 An estimated 5 to 7 million people

2:14:22 had died during the continuous global warfare.

2:14:26 The human toll extended far beyond the battlefields themselves.

2:14:31 The relentless demands of annual conscription

2:14:33 had reached deep into the countryside,

2:14:36 pulling young men from their communities for years at a time.

2:14:39 The demographic hole left village economies reeling.

2:14:43 Families faced severe, grinding poverty.

2:14:47 Their structures permanently ruptured by the absence of sons and husbands.

2:14:52 Hundreds of thousands of maimed veterans

2:14:55 returned to their rural homes, missing limbs,

2:14:58 permanently blinded by exploding black powder,

2:15:01 or suffering from psychological trauma that had no name and no treatment.

2:15:06 These men relied on overstretched church charities

2:15:09 and inadequate state pensions for their daily survival.

2:15:13 Continental industry had been crippled by the disruptions of the Continental

2:15:18 System and the deliberate destruction of bridges and roads by retreating armies.

2:15:24 Britain emerged from the wreckage as the unquestioned global power.

2:15:29 Its domestic industrial infrastructure was untouched.

2:15:34 Its financial system in London was the most sophisticated on earth.

2:15:39 The Royal Navy was physically larger and more

2:15:42 heavily armed than all other global navies combined.

2:15:46 British merchants monopolized the markets of Asia, Africa, and Latin America.

2:15:51 The defeat of France marked the beginning of the Pax Britannica,

2:15:56 a full century of imperial dominance that would

2:15:59 shape the architecture of the modern global economy.

2:16:05 The legacy of the fallen emperor, though, extended well beyond the battlefields.

2:16:11 Two decades of French occupation had

2:16:14 fundamentally rewired the daily reality of life

2:16:18 in annexed territories from Belgium to the Rhineland and the Italian peninsula.

2:16:24 The centralized state administration had dismantled old feudal jurisdictions,

2:16:30 abolished internal tolls, dissolved ancient urban guilds,

2:16:35 and created unified national markets.

2:16:38 Vast tracts of confiscated church and aristocratic lands had been auctioned off,

2:16:45 transferring enormous wealth to an ascendant

2:16:47 class of merchants and professionals.

2:16:50 The state had taken control of education and welfare, introduced civil marriage,

2:16:56 and granted legal emancipation to Jewish communities

2:16:59 in states like Westphalia and the Italian republics.

2:17:03 The Napoleonic Code established equality before

2:17:06 the law and the inviolability of private property.

2:17:11 Even after the French armies retreated,

2:17:13 modernizing states retained these efficient legal frameworks.

2:17:18 They formed the basis of civil law systems

2:17:22 stretching from Latin America to the Middle East.

2:17:26 The Congress of Vienna tried to cram these newly

2:17:30 empowered social classes back into their old positions.

2:17:34 The restored regimes favored aristocratic

2:17:37 landowners and the returning church hierarchy.

2:17:41 They attempted to reinstate ecclesiastical authority and feudal dues.

2:17:46 This deeply alienated the new winners of the Napoleonic era,

2:17:51 the propertied middle class,

2:17:53 the professional administrators trained in uniform bureaucratic systems,

2:17:58 and the religious minorities who had briefly tasted equal citizenship.

2:18:03 You cannot reimpose feudal obligations on citizens

2:18:07 who have spent 15 years holding legal

2:18:10 title to their own land and paying uniform taxes under a modern legal code.

2:18:16 The friction between the reactionary political settlement and the transformed

2:18:20 social reality made the restoration structurally unstable from the start,

2:18:26 and it served as the direct cause of the revolutions

2:18:30 that would violently detonate in 1830 and 1848.

2:18:37 The era forged national identities that would

2:18:40 define the 19th century and beyond.

2:18:43 The humiliation of the Prussian defeat at Jena

2:18:46 triggered a wave of German cultural and political nationalism,

2:18:50 sparking the long process that would culminate

2:18:53 in the unification of the German Empire.

2:18:56 The lived experience of the Kingdom of Italy,

2:18:59 a unified administration, a modern national military,

2:19:03 planted the seeds of the Risorgimento, giving Italian patriots a tangible memory

2:19:09 of a united peninsula free from Austrian domination.

2:19:15 Those incredibly [snorts] dense 51 years

2:19:18 shattered the ancient assumption that political

2:19:21 power and social status were ordained by divine right and noble birth.

2:19:27 The rapid ascent of a minor,

2:19:28 heavily accented provincial artillery officer to the throne of an empire

2:19:32 stretching from Madrid to Moscow was proof of something.

2:19:36 It demonstrated that an individual could

2:19:39 forge their own destiny through intellect, willpower, and ambition.

2:19:44 The concept of the career open to talents,

2:19:48 where advancement was based on proven merit rather than aristocratic bloodline,

2:19:55 became a permanent disruptive ideal.

2:19:58 It threatened every conservative monarchy on the planet and rewired

2:20:03 the expectations of the emerging middle classes across Europe.

2:20:09 In the decades after the death on St.

2:20:11 Helena, the figure of the emperor rapidly

2:20:13 transcended the historical reality of the man.

2:20:17 Writers, poets, and philosophers across the continent, Goethe, Byron, Hegel,

2:20:24 saw him as the embodiment of raw human potential,

2:20:28 the world spirit on horseback, Hegel called him.

2:20:32 A force that had ripped apart the stagnant

2:20:35 feudal order to drag humanity into modernity.

2:20:39 That a single life defined by immense

2:20:42 bloodshed and strict dictatorial control could simultaneously

2:20:46 become an enduring symbol of individual human

2:20:50 agency speaks to the complexity of the legacy.

2:20:54 It remains contested, heavily debated,

2:20:57 and permanently woven into how we think about the limits of power and ambition.

2:21:04 The blank stone slab in the remote Atlantic

2:21:06 Valley marked the physical end of the general,

2:21:09 sealing the era of massive cavalry charges

2:21:12 and continent-spanning armies into the realm of history.

2:21:16 The conservative monarchs gathering in the gilded halls

2:21:19 of Vienna believed they had successfully turned back the clock,

2:21:23 restoring the ancient quiet obedience of the European populace.

2:21:28 But the explosive ideals of nationalism, meritocracy,

2:21:32 and rational civil law had merely been forced underground,

2:21:37 where they spread rapidly through intellectual

2:21:39 salons and working-class taverns across the continent.

2:21:44 The revolutions that would detonate in 1830 and 1848 would prove

2:21:49 exactly how deeply the seeds of the imperial era had been planted,

2:21:54 guaranteeing that the ghost of the emperor would continue to shape

2:21:58 the political destiny of the world long after the guns had fallen silent.