Why Napoleon Fell: Spain, Russia, Britain, and a Man Who Could Not Stop

The idea

The exam's fifth band asks what the French Empire was and how the Congress of Vienna answered it, and the anchor's argument is that the empire's strength and its fall came from one source. Napoleon rose through the Revolution's armies: conscription without privilege, officers by merit, corps that marched apart and fought together, and a general who read maps and supply tables better than anyone alive. From Brumaire in seventeen ninety-nine to Tilsit in eighteen-oh-seven that machine beat Austria, Russia and Prussia, dissolved the Holy Roman Empire, and built an empire of forty-four million people by the anchor's count, exporting codes, customs unions, toleration and the abolition of serfdom, and conquest paid for conquest. The weakness was built in. Rule depended on victory, so he could never stop, and by eighteen-oh-five the aim was Europe. Three things he could not beat. Britain, after Trafalgar, could not be invaded, so he tried to strangle it with the Continental System, which enriched Britain and forced him into Iberia to close Portugal's ports. Spain, from eighteen-oh-eight, answered with guerrilla war, the little war that cost two hundred thousand French lives by the anchor's figure and fixed his best troops in a country he held only in its cities. Russia, the one power outside his control, drew six hundred thousand men east in eighteen twelve; Borodino, the wars' bloodiest day, won him a burned Moscow, and the October retreat killed most of the army. The coalition re-formed, Leipzig broke him in eighteen thirteen, Paris fell in fourteen, and after Elba the Hundred Days ended at Waterloo in June fifteen. His empire taught its subjects to be Germans, Italians and Spaniards, and the Congress of Vienna, meeting under Metternich from November fourteen to June fifteen, rebuilt Europe against exactly that: a balance of five powers, France restored without punishment, rewards from Poland and Italy, nationality ignored, and a Holy Alliance pledged to crush revolution anywhere. It could not undo the Code, the weakened nobility or the nationalism, and the anchor's century of peace held only until eighteen fifty-three.