(1769-1821), emperor of France. He was the second of five sons. The father, Charles Bonaparte, was a Corsican lawyer of an old Italian family prominent in camp and court for six centuries. A Bonaparte was banished from Florence as early as 1120. Charles, the father, seeing resistance useless, became reconciled to the French seizure of Corsica and stood well at the French court. He resided at Paris for several years as the head of a delegation of his countrymen. He had but small means, it would appear, but he had sufficient influence to place his children in the best schools of France. Napoleon, the second son, entered a military school at Brienne, where he was noted for ability in mathematics. He had a fondness for the lives of great men and for military tactics, with little liking for anything else. He was not popular. He spoke French with difficulty, Italian being his native language. As a natural consequence of a military education, he received an appointment in 1785 as a second lieutenant in the French army. When the French Revolution broke out he shrewdly took the side of the people against the monarchy. He soon rose by reason of his military ability and showed himself a masterly hand both in conducting a siege and in handling the mobs of Paris. In the wars that the young French republic found on its hands Napoleon was made commander-in-chief of the army. He conducted a brilliant campaign against the Austrians in Italy in 1796-7; carried the French arms into Egypt and Syria in 1798-9; and in 1799, under the forms of a new constitution, he made himself first consul, virtually supreme ruler of France. In 1802 he became consul for life, and in 1804 he assumed the title of emperor, and settled into the role of military despot. We cannot go into the history of the Napoleonic wars. They are still the wonder of military history. In the earlier part of these wars Austria was the most determined opponent. Napoleon led an army over the Great St. Bernard in the spring of 1800, dragging his cannon in the trunks of trees hollowed out to contain them. The battles of Marengo and Hohenlinden prostrated the house of Austria, and made Napoleon dictator of continental Europe. This assumption of power was by no means agreeable to Europe. In 1803 Russia, Austria, England, and Sweden formed a coalition against Napoleon. Napoleon defeated Austria and Russia at Austerlitz, December 2, 1805, and seemed to entrench himself all the more firmly. Of course such a career could not go unchecked. If boys roll a snowball large enough it breaks finally of its own weight. France could not become Europe. In 1812 the beginning of the end came. Napoleon invaded Russia with 400,000 troops and seemingly drove the Russians before him to Moscow where he proposed to winter. Suddenly fires broke out in every direction, the city was in flames, and Napoleon with his thinly clad army was left without shelter or supplies. Winter fell, a retreat was ordered. What with bitter frost, snowstorms, treacherous ice and rivers, burning bridges, starvation, fatigue, and the harassing assaults of legions of active, warmly clad, well fed, and well mounted Cossacks, swarming like hornets, only 20,000 men of that vast army reached the frontiers of Poland. Now that disaster had come, the nations rose against him. Napoleon took the field the next summer at the head of 600,000 men but was defeated at the battle of Leipsic October 16-19, 1813. The troops of Austria, Prussia, and Russia, joined by those of the Rhine principalities, marched on Paris and occupied that city. Meanwhile the English under Wellington had assisted the Spanish in driving the French over the Pyrenees. Napoleon was stripped of his territory and power, yet was permitted to retire to the little island of Elba, which was assigned him as an empire, and he was still allowed to retain the title of emperor. A year later, while the powers were in conference at Vienna endeavoring to rearrange the map of Europe, their deliberations were disturbed by the ill news that the emperor of Elba had landed on the coast of France and that his old soldiers had flocked to his standard. All in vain, however. Napoleon had tried too much. Had he been content to remain within the natural borders of France he might have been eminently successful, but it was too late to play the role of Alexander the Great and obtain worldwide power. The battle of Waterloo fought June 18, 1815, went against him. Napoleon was sent to St. Helena, England's prisoner of war, where he lived for six years quarreling with the commandant and writing his memoirs. May 8, 1821, he was buried at St. Helena, but in 1840 his remains were removed to Paris, where they lie beneath the dome of the Hotel des Invalides. His sarcophagus is a single polished stone of red Finnish granite, thirteen feet long, six and one-half wide, and fourteen and one-half high. The circular crypt in which the sarcophagus stands is of polished granite adorned with sculpture commemorative of Napoleon's work. On the pavement are recorded the names of his battles. There is no reason to say that Napoleon had any love for the common people or that he tried to make life easier for them; but in carrying out his selfish schemes to obtain power for himself we may say that he did much for the popular cause. Himself an unscrupulous aristocrat and despot, he destroyed many a stronghold of aristocracy and pulled down many aristocratic families. He reformed the laws of France, abolishing many an injustice. The Code of Napoleon is still used in France, Rhenish Prussia, Bavaria, Baden, Holland, Belgium, and Italy, and is the basis of legal procedure in our own state of Louisiana. He threw magnificent bridges over the Seine, straightened out the streets of Paris, especially in the poor quarters, laying out boulevards radiating from a common center from which cannon could be used to suppress uprisings. He built roads, second only to those of the Romans, encouraged manufactures, granted religious liberty, restored Sunday formerly abolished by the Revolutionary authorities, and declared a general amnesty for past political offenses. Forty thousand royalists banished by the Revolution returned to France. In a way, Americans have a special interest in the Bonaparte family. In 1803 Jerome, the youngest brother of Napoleon, visited Baltimore in command of a French frigate. He was received with enthusiasm by the exclusive society of the city. On the eve before Christmas he was married by Bishop John Carroll to Miss Elizabeth Patterson, the beautiful young daughter of a wealthy merchant. When Jerome and his wife sailed for France she was forbidden to land and sought refuge in London. Napoleon desired Jerome to marry a European princess and sit on a European throne. Jerome tried, we may believe, to change the emperor's mind, but, failing in this, abandoned his wife to her father's care. Descendants of the marriage have borne themselves creditably in the world and are still living. All this is a piece of the same treatment that Napoleon accorded his own faithful wife. In 1797 he married the beautiful Josephine, who was the companion of his years of struggle. She stood by his side when he was crowned. They had no children. He was ambitious to be the head of a new royal family. The French officials granted him a divorce. In 1810 he married an Austrian archduchess, a member of the famous Hapsburg family. They had one son, but he died young. Writers have not failed to note that Napoleon's star seemed to set from the day when he discarded Josephine. A book in which Napoleon kept notes when a schoolboy has been preserved. Strangely enough, the last entry closed with the words: "St. Helena, a small island." See CORSICA; ELBA; JOSEPHINE; FRENCH REVOLUTION; WATERLOO; MURAT. The ship is over the bar, then; free she bounds shoreward, amid shouting and vivats! Citoyen Buonaparte is "named general of the interior, by acclamation;" quelled sections have to disarm in such humor as they may; sacred right of insurrection is gone forever! The Sieyes constitution can disembark itself, and begin marching. The miraculous convention ship has got to land; and is there, shall we figuratively say, changed, as epic ships are wont, into a kind of Sea Nymph, never to sail more; to roam the waste azure, a miracle in history! "It is false," says Napoleon, "that we fired first with blank charge; it had been a waste of life to do that." Most false: the firing was with sharp and sharpest shot: to all men it was plain that here was no sport; the rabbets and plinths of Saint-Roch church show splintered by it to this hour. Singular: in old Broglie's time, six years ago, this whiff of grapeshot was promised; but it could not be given then; could not have profited then. Now, however, the time is come for it, and the man; and, behold, you have it; and the thing we specifically call French Revolution is blown into space by it, and become a thing that was!--Carlyle, French Revolution.