Napoleon Bonaparte

Mocked for His Accent at Nine

He arrived at a French military school at nine, from Corsica, speaking little French, and was mocked for both. The French Revolution destroyed the officer class above him and he went up through the hole it left: artillery command at Toulon at twenty-four, the Italian campaign at twenty-six, a coup at thirty that made him First Consul, emperor at thirty-five. He fought around sixty battles and lost about seven. Austerlitz in 1805 is still taught as one of the most complete tactical victories in military history. But the thing he was right about outlasting everything is the Code Napoléon of 1804 — one clear body of civil law replacing a thousand local customs, equality before it, careers open to talent — which is still the skeleton of the law in much of Europe, Latin America and beyond. In 1812 he took roughly six hundred thousand men into Russia. A small fraction came out.

A Rock Fifteen Hundred Miles Away

After his defeat at Waterloo in 1815, the British put him on Saint Helena, a rock in the South Atlantic fifteen hundred miles from anywhere, and he died there on 5 May 1821, aged fifty-one, almost certainly of stomach cancer — the disease that killed his father. He spent his last six years dictating his memoirs to a companion, the Comte de Las Cases, who published them, and in them he rebuilt himself as the liberator of Europe. It worked. The legend that came off that island is largely the one still in circulation.