Napoleon Bonaparte

NAPOLEON Bonaparte

I would like to speak about someone very important in French and World History, a great leader called Napoleon Bonaparte, a brilliant military that led the French army in a series of victories against all the European superpowers. As the emperor of France, he was a great leader, who concluded the French Revolution, transformed the government and introduced a legal system that still remains in Europe. Nevertheless, he was a controversial person, because he annulled a lot of advances of the French Revolution and turned France into an empire, not very different from the kingdom it was before.

This is a small introduction of his life, here you have the story:

Napoleon Bonaparte was born in the year 1769 in Corsica, a small island in the Mediterranean Sea. At the age of 16, he joined the army, and a few months later he had an important rank: second lieutenant. But he wanted more, so eight years later, in 1793 he achieved a significant victory on the Austrians in Tolon, Italy and a year after he left to Egypt, with the intention of invade India and crush the English whom, as you know, had a very important colony there.

In 1803 Napoleon dominated all continental Europe, but he wanted to have the control of the seas, the majority in hands of the English. He assembled an army with which he could invade England, but he failed in his mission and returned back to France.

Over time he wanted to increase his power and that of his army and crowned himself emperor. With a reinforced army, he won a lot of important battles like Auserlitz in 1805, Jena in 1806, Friedland in 1807 and Wargam in 1809 against the coalition of the Austrian, Prussian and Russian. His empire began to extend to countries like Spain, Austria, Norway and Italy and Portugal.

In 1812, he began the unsuccessful campaign of Russia. His disastrous withdrawal to the doors of Moscow coincided with the union of all Europe against Napoleon, so, two years later, he abdicated the throne of France and went to the island of Elba, in the Mediterranean Sea in 1814.

But his ambition won himself and so, in 1815 he returned to France to reconquer his empire and began a new period of time called the Period of the Hundred Days until he was definitively defeated in Waterloo, Belgium in June, 1815.

Napoleon was deported to the island of Saint Elena, in the Atlantic Ocean, where he died in 1821. In 1840, his remains returned to France. They lay in a amazing big tomb in the « Monument a les Invalides » in Paris.