Napoleon Bonaparte
The artillery officer who made himself emperor of France, conquered most of Europe, and lost it all in Russia.
Napoleon Bonaparte was born in Corsica in 1769, a year after France bought the island from Genoa, which made him French by a few months. He ended as the ruler of an empire stretching from Spain to Poland, then as a prisoner on a volcanic island in the South Atlantic. In between he fought around sixty battles, lost fewer than ten, and rebuilt the way European states are governed.
He rose through the artillery, the most technical branch of the army and the least aristocratic, at the moment when the Revolution was executing or exiling the officers above him. He made his name retaking Toulon from the British in 1793 and saved the government from a royalist mob in Paris in 1795. Then came the Italian campaign of 1796 and 1797, where a ragged and unpaid army beat the Austrians again and again and he negotiated a peace treaty on his own authority. The government in Paris now had a general it could not control.
From general to head of state
The Egyptian expedition of 1798 was a failure, and Nelson destroyed the French fleet at the Nile, but Napoleon's own dispatches made it sound like a triumph. He abandoned his army in Egypt, sailed home, and used the reputation. In November 1799 he seized power in a coup and made himself First Consul, then Consul for life, then emperor in December 1804, taking the crown from the pope's hands and putting it on his own head.
The reforms are the half of his career that lasted. The Civil Code of 1804 replaced a patchwork of local and feudal law with one clear system built on legal equality, property rights, and secular marriage, and he imposed it everywhere he conquered. He founded the Bank of France, rebuilt the tax system, made peace with the Catholic Church on his own terms in 1801, and created the state secondary schools and the Legion of Honor. He also brought back slavery in the French colonies in 1802, censored the press, and ran a police state under Joseph Fouche.
The wars
Trafalgar in October 1805 ended any chance of invading Britain and confined French power to the land. Six weeks later, at Austerlitz, he destroyed a larger Austrian and Russian army by deliberately weakening his own right flank to invite an attack there. Prussia was smashed in a single day at Jena and Auerstedt in 1806.
Unable to invade Britain, he tried to bankrupt it by closing Europe to British trade. That decision pulled him into Spain in 1808, where a popular uprising and a British army killed roughly a quarter of a million French soldiers over six years, and into Russia in 1812, where he crossed the border with about 600,000 men and came back with a small fraction of them. Most died of disease, hunger, and cold rather than in battle.
After Russia, everyone combined against him. The Battle of the Nations at Leipzig in 1813 was the largest battle in European history until the First World War. He abdicated in April 1814 and was exiled to Elba, escaped, returned for a hundred days in 1815, and lost at Waterloo to Wellington and Blucher. The British sent him to Saint Helena, an island 1,200 miles from the African coast, where he died in 1821, probably of stomach cancer.
What he left
His Civil Code is still the ancestor of the law used across Europe, Latin America, and Japan. He also killed somewhere between three and six million people, taught Germany, Spain, and Russia nationalism by invading them, and by destroying the Spanish monarchy in 1808 opened the way for Latin American independence. The Congress of Vienna, which met as he fell, was built for one purpose: to make sure no French ruler could ever do it again.