In 1804 Napoleon crowned himself Emperor of the French, ostensibly to prevent the Bourbon monarchy from ever being reestablished. His plan to invade Britain—which was funding his European enemies—was thwarted by Nelson’s destruction of Napoleon’s navy at Trafalgar. However, on land Napoleon seemed invulnerable, defeating the Austrians, Russians and Prussians in a series of stunning victories at Ulm (1805), Austerlitz (1805) and Jena (1806), ending the alliance of these powers with Britain and establishing the Confederation of the Rhine as a French satellite in much of Germany. The emperors of Austria and Russia, the king of Prussia all bowed before his power: only Britain held out against him.
After this, Napoleon began to overreach himself. He made his brothers into kings, his marshals into princes. In 1808 he imposed his brother Joseph (who had first been king of Naples) as king of Spain, provoking the Spanish to revolt. The British sent troops to support the Spanish, and for the next few years many French troops were tied up on the Iberian Peninsula fighting the Spanish and a British army under Wellington
He had married Josephine de Beauharnais, the widow of a French aristocrat, for love—but she had failed to give him an heir. He divorced her and hoped to marry a sister of the Russian Tsar Alexander I—a match both prestigious and politic, since the security of his precarious empire depended on his personal friendship with the tsar, as agreed at Tilsit. But Alexander, initially dazzled by Napoleon, was no longer so impressed: Russia was turning against French dominance. Alexander refused the marriage—and Napoleon instead married Grand Duchess Marie-Louise, the Habsburg daughter of Austrian Emperor Francis. She gave him a son, Napoleon, the king of Rome. But the Russians began to withdraw from Napoleon’s blockade of Britain.
In 1812 Napoleon amassed the
Heartened by Napoleon’s humiliation, the other European powers formed a new alliance against the French. The allies defeated Napoleon’s forces in Spain and at Leipzig, taking Paris in 1814 and exiling Napoleon to the island of Elba.
But Napoleon was not done. Escaping from Elba in 1815, he made a triumphant progress north through France to Paris, telling the troops sent to stop him, “If any man would shoot his emperor, he may do so now.” His old generals and their armies rallied round him, but the glorious Hundred Days of his restoration came to an end on June 18, 1815 near the little settlement of Waterloo in what is now Belgium. As the duke of Wellington, the British commander, conceded, it was “the closest run thing”; but Napoleon’s defeat was decisive.
The emperor was exiled to St. Helena in the South Atlantic, dying of stomach cancer in 1821. Later, when Wellington was asked whom he reckoned to have been the best general ever, he answered: “In this age, in past ages, in any age, Napoleon.”
BEETHOVEN
1770–1827
Edna St. Vincent Millay, “On Hearing a Symphony of Beethoven” (1928)
Ludwig van Beethoven’s music encompassed the transition between the Classical and Romantic styles, and his astounding contribution was all the more remarkable for being completed against the background of the encroaching deafness that plagued the last thirty years of his life. His nine symphonies raised the genre of orchestral music to a grand level, while his late-period string quartets and piano sonatas are some of the most transcendent achievements in classical music.
Born in Bonn, Germany, Beethoven was of Flemish descent. Both his father, Johann van Beethoven, and grandfather worked as court singers to the elector-archbishop of Bonn. Unfortunately, however, his father was also an alcoholic, who attempted to raise the family fortunes by touting his second son Ludwig as a child prodigy, somewhat unsuccessfully.
