Napoleon

Education

Napoleon's educational reforms laid the foundation of a modern system of secondary and tertiary education in France and throughout much of Europe. He synthesized academic elements from the Ancien Régime, The Enlightenment, and the French Revolution. His education laws of 1802 left most primary education in the hands of religious or communal schools which taught basic literacy and numeracy for a minority of the population. He abolished the revolutionary central schools and replaced them with secondary schools and elite lycées where the curriculum was based on reading, writing, mathematics, Latin, natural history, classics, and ancient history.

He retained the revolutionary higher education system, with grandes écoles in professions including law, medicine, pharmacy, engineering and school teaching. He introduced grandes écoles in history and geography, but opposed one in literature because it was not vocational. He also founded the military academy of Saint Cyr. He promoted the advanced centres, such as the École Polytechnique, that provided both military expertise and advanced research in science.

In 1808, he founded the Imperial University, a supervisory body with control over curriculum and discipline. The following year he introduced the baccalaureate. The system was designed to produce the efficient bureaucrats, technicians, professionals and military officers that the Napoleonic state required. It outperformed its European counterparts, many of which borrowed from the French system. Female education, in contrast, was designed to be practical and religious, based on home science, the catechism, basic literacy and numeracy, and enough science to eradicate superstition.

Siege of Toulon

Bonaparte returned to his regiment in Nice and was made captain of a coastal battery. In July 1793 he published a pamphlet, Le souper de Beaucaire (Supper at Beaucaire), demonstrating his support for the National Convention which was heavily influenced by the Jacobins.

In September, with the help of his fellow Corsican Antoine Christophe Saliceti, Bonaparte was appointed artillery commander of the republican forces sent to recapture the port of Toulon, which was occupied by allied forces. He quickly increased the available artillery and proposed a plan to capture a hill fort where republican guns could dominate the city's harbour and force the allies to evacuate. The successful assault on the position on 16–17 December led to the capture of the city.

Toulon brought Bonaparte to the attention of powerful men including Augustin Robespierre, the younger brother of Maximilien Robespierre, a leading Jacobin. He was promoted to brigadier general and put in charge of defences on the Mediterranean coast. In February 1794 he was made artillery commander of the Army of Italy and devised plans to attack the Kingdom of Sardinia.

The French army carried out Bonaparte's plan in the Second Battle of Saorgio in April 1794 and then advanced to seize Ormea in the mountains. From Ormea it headed west to outflank the Austro-Sardinian positions around Saorge. After this campaign, Augustin Robespierre sent Bonaparte on a mission to the Republic of Genoa to determine the country's intentions towards France.

13 Vendémiaire

After the Fall of Maximilien Robespierre in July 1794, Bonaparte's association with leading Jacobins made him politically suspect to the new regime. He was arrested on 9 August but released two weeks later. He was asked to draw up plans to attack Italian positions as part of France's war with Austria, and in March 1795 he took part in an expedition to take back Corsica from the British, but the French were repulsed by the Royal Navy.

From 1794 Bonaparte was in a romantic relationship with Désirée Clary, whose sister Julie Clary had married Bonaparte's elder brother Joseph. In April 1795 Bonaparte was assigned to the Army of the West, which was engaged in the War in the Vendée—a civil war and royalist counter-revolution in the Vendée region. As an infantry command, it was a demotion from artillery general, and he pleaded poor health to avoid the posting. During this period he wrote the romantic novella Clisson et Eugénie, about a soldier and his lover, in a clear parallel to Bonaparte's own relationship with Clary.

In August he obtained a position with the Bureau of Topography, where he worked on military planning. On 15 September he was removed from the list of generals in regular service for refusing to serve in the Vendée campaign. He sought a transfer to Constantinople to offer his services to Sultan Selim III. The request was eventually granted, but he never took up the post.

On 3 October royalists in Paris declared a rebellion against the National Convention. Paul Barras, a leader of the Thermidorian Reaction, knew of Bonaparte's military exploits at Toulon and made him second in command of the forces defending the convention in the Tuileries Palace. Bonaparte had seen the massacre of the king's Swiss Guard during the Insurrection of 10 August 1792 there three years earlier and realized that artillery would be the key to its defence. He ordered a young cavalry officer, Joachim Murat, to seize cannons, and Bonaparte deployed them in key positions. On 5 October 1795—13 Vendémiaire An IV in the French Republican calendar—he fired on the rebels with canister rounds (described by Thomas Carlyle as "the whiff of grapeshot"). About 300 to 1,400 rebels died in the uprising. Bonaparte's role in defeating the rebellion earned him and his family the patronage of the new government, the French Directory. On 26 October he was promoted to commander of the Army of the Interior, and in January 1796, he was appointed head of the Army of Italy.

Within weeks of the Vendémiaire uprising, Bonaparte was romantically involved with Joséphine de Beauharnais, the former mistress of Barras. Josephine had been born in the French colonies in the Lesser Antilles, and her family owned slaves on sugar plantations. The couple married on 9 March 1796 in a civil ceremony. Bonaparte began to habitually style himself "Napoleon Bonaparte" rather than using the Italian form "Napoleone di Buonaparte."

First Italian campaign

Two days after the marriage, Bonaparte left Paris to take command of the Army of Italy. He went on the offensive, hoping to defeat the Kingdom of Sardinia in Piedmont before their Austrian allies could intervene. In a series of victories during the Montenotte campaign, he knocked the Piedmontese out of the war in two weeks. The French then focused on the Austrians, laying siege to Mantua. The Austrians launched offensives against the French to break the siege, but Bonaparte defeated every relief effort, winning the Battle of Castiglione, the Battle of Bassano, the Battle of Arcole, and the Battle of Rivoli. The French triumph at Rivoli in January 1797 led to the collapse of the Austrian position in Italy. At Rivoli Austria lost 43% of its soldiers dead, wounded or taken prisoner.

The French then invaded the heartlands of the House of Habsburg. French forces in southern Germany had been defeated by Archduke Charles, Duke of Teschen in 1796, but Charles withdrew his forces to protect Vienna after learning of Bonaparte's assault. In their first encounter, Bonaparte pushed Charles back and advanced deep into Austrian territory after winning the Battle of Tarvis in March 1797. Alarmed by the French thrust that reached Leoben, about 100 km from Vienna, the Austrians sued for peace. The preliminary peace of Leoben, signed on 18 April, gave France control of most of northern Italy and the Low Countries and promised to partition the Republic of Venice with Austria. Bonaparte marched on Venice and forced its surrender, ending 1,100 years of Venetian independence. He authorized the French to loot treasures such as the Horses of Saint Mark.

In this Italian campaign, Bonaparte's army captured 150,000 prisoners, 540 cannons, and 170 standards. The French army fought 67 actions and won 18 pitched battles through superior artillery technology and Bonaparte's tactics. Bonaparte extracted an estimated 45 million French pounds from Italy during the campaign, another 12 million pounds in precious metals and jewels, and more than 300 paintings and sculptures.

During the campaign, Bonaparte became increasingly influential in French politics. He founded two newspapers: one for the troops in his army and one for circulation in France. The royalists attacked him for looting Italy and warned that he might become a dictator. Bonaparte sent General Charles-Pierre Augereau to Paris to support a coup d'état that purged royalists from the legislative councils on 4 September—the Coup of 18 Fructidor. This left Barras and his republican allies in control again, but more dependent upon Bonaparte, who finalized peace terms with Austria by the Treaty of Campo Formio. Bonaparte returned to Paris on 5 December 1797 as a hero. He met Charles Maurice de Talleyrand, France's foreign minister, and took command of the Army of England for the planned invasion of Britain.

Egyptian expedition

After two months of planning, Bonaparte decided that France's naval strength was not yet sufficient to confront the Royal Navy. He decided on a military expedition to seize Egypt and thereby undermine Britain's access to its trade interests in India. Bonaparte wished to establish a French presence in the Middle East and join forces with Tipu Sultan, the Sultan of Mysore, an enemy of the British. Bonaparte assured the Directory that "as soon as he had conquered Egypt, he will establish relations with the Indian princes and, together with them, attack the English in their possessions". The Directory agreed in order to secure a trade route to the Indian subcontinent.

In May 1798, Bonaparte was elected a member of the French Academy of Sciences. His Egyptian expedition included a group of 167 scientists, with mathematicians, naturalists, chemists, and geodesists among them. Their discoveries included the Rosetta Stone, and their work was published in the Description de l'Égypte in 1809. En route to Egypt, Bonaparte reached Hospitaller Malta on 9 June 1798, then controlled by the Knights Hospitaller. Grand Master Ferdinand von Hompesch zu Bolheim surrendered after token resistance, and Bonaparte captured an important naval base with the loss of only three men.

Bonaparte and his expedition eluded pursuit by the Royal Navy and landed at Alexandria on 1 July. He fought the Battle of Shubra Khit against the Mamluks, Egypt's ruling military caste. This helped the French practise their defensive tactic for the Battle of the Pyramids on 21 July, about 24 km (15 mi) from the pyramids. Bonaparte's forces of 25,000 roughly equalled those of the Mamluks' Egyptian cavalry. Twenty-nine French and approximately 2,000 Egyptians were killed. The victory boosted the French army's morale.

On 1 August 1798 the British fleet under Sir Horatio Nelson captured or destroyed all but two vessels of the French fleet in the Battle of the Nile, preventing Bonaparte from strengthening the French position in the Mediterranean. His army had succeeded in a temporary increase of French power in Egypt, though it faced repeated uprisings. In early 1799 he moved an army into the Ottoman province of Damascus (Syria and Galilee). Bonaparte led these 13,000 French soldiers in the conquest of the coastal towns of Arish, Gaza, Jaffa, and Haifa. The attack on Jaffa was particularly brutal. Bonaparte discovered that many of the defenders were former prisoners of war, ostensibly on parole, so he ordered the garrison and some 1,500–5,000 prisoners to be executed by bayonet or drowning. Men, women, and children were robbed and murdered for three days.

Bonaparte began with an army of 13,000 men. 1,500 were reported missing, 1,200 died in combat, and thousands perished from disease—mostly bubonic plague. He failed to reduce the fortress of Acre, so he marched his army back to Egypt in May. Bonaparte was alleged to have ordered plague-stricken men to be poisoned with opium to speed the retreat. Back in Egypt on 25 July, Bonaparte defeated an Ottoman amphibious invasion at Abukir.

Bonaparte stayed informed of European affairs. He learned that France had suffered a series of defeats in the War of the Second Coalition. On 24 August 1799, fearing that the Republic's future was in doubt, he took advantage of the temporary departure of British ships from French coastal ports and set sail for France, despite the fact that he had received no explicit orders from Paris. The army was left in the charge of Jean-Baptiste Kléber.

Concordat

Seeking national reconciliation between revolutionaries and Catholics, Napoleon and Pope Pius VII agreed to the Concordat of 1801. The agreement recognized the Catholic Church as the majority church of France and in return the Church recognized Napoleon's regime, undercutting much of the ground from royalists. The Concordat confirmed the seizure of Church lands and endowments during the revolution, but reintroduced state salaries for the clergy. The government also controlled the nomination of bishops for investiture by the pope. Bishops and other clergy were required to swear an oath of loyalty to the regime.

When the Concordat was published on 8 April 1802, Napoleon presented another set of laws called the Organic Articles which further increased state control over the French Church. Similar arrangements were made with the Church in territories controlled by Napoleon, especially in Italy and Germany.

Religious emancipation

In February 1795, the National Convention proclaimed religious equality for France's Protestant churches and other religions. In April 1802, Napoleon published laws increasing state control of Calvinist congregations and Lutheran directories, with their pastors to be paid by the state. With Napoleon's military victories, formal religious equality and civil rights for religious minorities spread to the conquered territories and satellite states, although their implementation varied with the local authorities.

Jews in France had been granted full civil rights in September 1791 and religious equality in 1795. The revolutionary and Napoleonic regimes abolished Jewish ghettoes in the territories they conquered. Napoleon wished to assimilate Jews into French society and convened an assembly of Jewish notables in 1806 to that end. In 1807, he summoned a Sanhedrin to adapt the law of Moses to those of the empire. An imperial decree of March 1808 organized Jewish worship into consistories, limited usury and encouraged Jews to adopt a family name, intermarriage, and civil marriage and divorce. Jews, however, were still subject to discrimination in many parts of the empire and satellite states.

Children

Napoleon married Joséphine in 1796, but the marriage produced no children. In 1806, he adopted his stepson Eugène de Beauharnais and his second cousin Stéphanie de Beauharnais, and he arranged dynastic marriages for them.

Napoleon's marriage to Marie Louise produced one child, Napoleon Francis Joseph Charles (Napoleon II), known from birth as the King of Rome. When Napoleon abdicated in 1815, he named his son his successor as "Napoleon II", but the allies refused to recognize him. He was awarded the title of the Duke of Reichstadt in 1818 and died of tuberculosis aged 21, with no children.

Napoleon acknowledged one illegitimate son: Charles Léon by Eléonore Denuelle de La Plaigne. Alexandre Colonna-Walewski, the son of his Polish mistress Maria Walewska, was also widely known to be his child, as DNA evidence has confirmed. He may have had further illegitimate offspring.