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Napoleon was appointed to command the French Army of Italy in March 1796. His orders were to invade northern Italy and occupy Lombardy, a move that the French Directory believed would force the Austrians to move troops south from the Rhine front. -
The French campaign in Egypt and Syria was Napoleon’s campaign in the Ottoman territories of Egypt and Syria, proclaimed to defend French trade interests. -
The Consulate was the top-level Government of France from the fall of the Directory in the coup of 18 Brumaire on 10 November 1799 until the start of the Napoleonic Empire on 18 May 1804. -
The national bank of France, created to restore confidence in the French banking system after the financial upheavals of the revolutionary period. -
The Concordat of 1801 sought national reconciliation between revolutionaries and Catholics and solidified the Roman Catholic Church as the majority church of France. -
In August 1802, Napoleon proclaimed himself First Consul for Life. A new constitution of his own devising legislated a succession to rule for his son, and he had taken the major steps in creating a new regime in his own image. -
The civil code gave post-revolutionary France its first coherent set of laws concerning property, colonial affairs, the family and individual rights. -
In Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, Napoleon Bonaparte is crowned Napoleon I, the first Frenchman to hold the title of emperor in a thousand years. Pope Pius VII handed Napoleon the crown that the 35-year-old conqueror of Europe placed on his own head. -
A British fleet under Admiral Lord Nelson defeats a combined French and Spanish fleet at the Battle of Trafalgar, fought off the coast of Spain. -
The Holy Roman Empire had survived over a thousand years when it was finally destroyed by Napoleon and the French in 1806. -
The foreign policy of Napoleon Bonaparte against the United Kingdom during the Napoleonic Wars. -
The Spanish people rose up against the French army in Madrid. -
The French invasion of Russia was begun by Napoleon to force Russia back into the Continental blockade of the United Kingdom. -
The Battle of Leipzig was the decisive defeat for Napoleon, resulting in the destruction of what was left of French power in Germany and Poland. -
The Hundred Days, also known as the War of the Seventh Coalition, marked the period between Napoleon's return from eleven months of exile on the island of Elba to Paris. -
A French army under the command of Napoleon was defeated by two of the armies of the Seventh Coalition. -
Napoleon's defeat ultimately signaled the end of France's domination of Europe. He abdicated for a second time and was exiled to the remote island of Saint Helena, in the southern Atlantic Ocean, where he lived out the rest of his life.