Napoleon spent ten months on this island in the Mediterranean. He was able to follow events in France without much difficulty. This initial exile was part of a relatively lenient settlement granted by the allies in 1814 after Napoleon’s initial…
Napoleon’s eventual acquisition of political power may be attributed partly to his success in publicizing his Egyptian campaign as a great victory for France that spread the values of the Revolution. These engravings by the writer and artist Vivant…
After a six–week journey from France, the army of some 38,000 arrived in Egypt. The French stormed and took Alexandria first, then moved up the Nile toward Cairo. On 21 July Napoleon’s troops confronted and decisively defeated the army of the…
The problems of the revolutionary government had so intensified that the two leaders, Abbé Sieyès and Roger Ducos, plotted to overthrow it with the help of the most famous military man of the day. But the legislative body, particularly the lower…
Where Napoleon was once the conqueror, the world now avenges itself. This sense of reversal, felt widely outside of France, characterized a number of the caricatures of Napoleon, and indeed of the entire Revolution.
All regions of France did not support Napoleon equally. His rule aroused most enthusiasm in the east (a prerevolutionary border region crucial in the Napoleonic wars) and the center of the country, least in the west, which had long provided a home to…
This image reveals grotesque mistreatment of blacks even during training exercises. Here a cavalryman (chasseur) plans to use a black as a live prey for hunting dogs.
The fighting between the French and the Haitians was very bloody. When the French tried to put down Toussaint in 1802, it took them some five months with an expeditionary force of 23,000. Supplied by locals, the French seized the towns, gradually…
