Napoleon Bonaparte History
Must Know Facts About the French Emperor

Napoleon at a glance

Napoleon Bonaparte was born on 15 August 1769 in Ajaccio, Corsica, and died on 5 May 1821 on Saint Helena, aged 51. He was Emperor of the French from 18 May 1804 until his first abdication in 1814, and briefly again during the Hundred Days in 1815.

He is remembered for two things that pull in different directions. Many historians rank him among the great military commanders. His legal and administrative reforms, above all the civil code of 1804, later called the Napoleonic Code, outlasted his empire. The same code entrenched equality before the law and also reduced the rights of women and children, so what you make of him depends a good deal on which part you look at.

This page covers the facts people most often search for: his origins, how he rose, the coronation, Russia, the two exiles, his height, his death and tomb, a quotation often credited to him, and whether his army fired on the pyramids.

Was he French?

Yes, though Corsica had only just become French. The Republic of Genoa ceded the island to France in the 1768 Treaty of Versailles, the year before he was born. It became a province of France in 1770.

His family was of Italian origin: the Buonapartes descended from a minor Tuscan noble family that had moved to Corsica in the 16th century. His mother tongues were Corsican and Italian. In January 1779, aged 9, he moved to the French mainland and went to a school in Autun to improve his French. He became fluent but kept a Corsican accent, and at the military academy at Brienne-le-Château other boys bullied him for his accent, his birthplace, his small stature and his poor French.

From Corsican Origins to the French Throne

He was commissioned as an officer in the French royal army in 1785 and supported the Revolution from 1789. He rose quickly after the siege of Toulon in 1793, and in 1796 he led a campaign against the Austrians and their Italian allies that made him a national hero. In 1798 he led the invasion of Egypt and Syria.

In November 1799 he organised the coup of 18 Brumaire against the government of the Directory and became First Consul. His civil code came into force in March 1804, and in May 1804 he became Emperor of the French.

The self-coronation

On 2 December 1804, at Notre-Dame in Paris, with Pope Pius VII taking part, Napoleon was anointed by the Pope and then crowned himself. He then crowned Joséphine.

The popular story is that he snatched the crown from the Pope’s hands. The Fondation Napoléon describes it differently: he picked up the crown from the altar and put it on his own head, “following the agreed order of service.” The Fondation Napoléon reads it as a symbolic gesture that “emphasized the political but also spiritual power that Napoleon aimed to wield over Pope Pius VII.”

What went wrong in Russia, 1812

Napoleon invaded Russia on 24 June 1812. The best-known record of what happened to his army is the chart drawn by the retired engineer Charles Minard, dated 20 November 1869.

By Minard’s figures:

Crossed the Neman into Russia	422,000 men
Reached Moscow	100,000
Crossed the Neman back out	10,000

So most of the loss came before the retreat from Moscow began. The main body of the army shrank by a third in the first eight weeks, before any major battle, partly because of diseases such as diphtheria, dysentery and typhus.

Which diseases did the most damage is still being studied. In October 2025 a team from the Institut Pasteur published DNA evidence from 13 soldiers of the retreat, buried in Vilnius. They found the bacteria behind paratyphoid fever and relapsing fever, adding to an earlier study that had found the agents of typhus and trench fever. The institute says their precise role in the deaths is not known, and 13 soldiers is a small sample.

The retreat added its own losses: the army could not be fed, it was still in summer clothing when winter arrived, and Cossacks harassed it constantly. But on Minard’s numbers the army was already a fraction of its size by the time it reached Moscow.

The two exiles: Elba and Saint Helena

In 1813 Prussia and Austria joined Russia, and Napoleon was decisively defeated at the Battle of Leipzig. The coalition took Paris and forced him to abdicate in April 1814. He was sent to the Mediterranean island of Elba, and the Bourbons returned to the throne under Louis XVIII.

Ten months later he escaped from Elba with around a thousand men and marched on Paris. Louis XVIII fled, and Napoleon ruled again for the period known as the Hundred Days. His return ended in defeat at Waterloo on 18 June 1815.

This time the British held him on Saint Helena, in the South Atlantic, 1,870 km from the west coast of Africa. He and 27 followers arrived in October 1815, and he lived there until his death five and a half years later.

What if he had won at Waterloo?

It is a popular question, and the numbers around it are worth knowing. On 13 March 1815 the powers at the Congress of Vienna declared Napoleon an outlaw. Four days later Great Britain, Russia, Austria and Prussia each pledged to put 150,000 men into the field to end his rule.

At Waterloo he was defeated by two of the coalition’s armies: a British-led force under the Duke of Wellington, and a Prussian one under Blücher. A victory there would still have left him facing the rest of a coalition that had declared him an outlaw. How long he could have held out is speculation, and you can weigh it yourself.

The Height Myth and Where It Came From

Napoleon was not unusually short. Three French sources, his valet Constant, General Gourgaud and his doctor Francesco Antommarchi, gave his height as just over 5 pieds 2 pouces. Those are French units: the French inch, the pouce, was about 2.7 cm, longer than the English inch of 2.54 cm.

Read as French measures, that is about 1.67 m, just under 5 ft 6 in. Estimates vary a little (some historians put him at 1.70 m), and sources describe that as around average, or a little above, for a Frenchman of his time. Read as English feet and inches, the same figure becomes 5 ft 2 in, which is where the “short” idea gets its number.

The image did the rest. British cartoonists repeatedly drew him as short, above all James Gillray, whose caricatures of him were enormously popular and influential.

How he died

In March 1821 he was confined to bed, and he died on 5 May. Antommarchi and the British doctors wrote separate autopsy reports, each concluding that he had died of internal bleeding caused by stomach cancer, the disease that had killed his father. The Fondation Napoléon notes that the autopsy findings were signed off by no fewer than seven doctors.

A later theory held that he had been poisoned with arsenic, because high levels were found in samples of his hair. Later studies found similar levels in hair from his childhood, and from his son and Joséphine; arsenic was widely used in 19th-century medicines and products such as hair creams. A 2021 study by gastrointestinal pathologists again concluded that he died of stomach cancer.

Where he is buried

He was buried on Saint Helena. In 1840 the British government gave King Louis Philippe I permission to bring his remains back to France (the retour des cendres), and a state funeral was held at Les Invalides in Paris on 15 December 1840.

His tomb under the dome took two decades to finish: on 2 April 1861, in the presence of Napoleon III, his coffin was moved into the sarcophagus. The sarcophagus is often described as red porphyry, but it is made of quartzite from Shoksha, in Russian Karelia, on the shores of Lake Onega. It rests on a base of green granite from the Vosges.

His brothers Jérôme and Joseph have tombs in the same church, completed in 1862 and 1864, and in December 1940 the coffin of his son, Napoleon II, was brought from Vienna and placed beside him.

The quote often credited to him

“History is a set of lies agreed upon.”

Napoleon used a version of this, but the idea is older than him. On Saint Helena, as recorded by Emmanuel de Las Cases in the Mémorial de Sainte-Hélène, he asked what historical truth was, most of the time, and answered: “une fable convenue”, a fable agreed upon. The next words are “ainsi qu’on l’a dit fort ingénieusement”, as has been very cleverly said. Quote Investigator reads them as Napoleon disclaiming credit; the 1823 English translation attaches them to the sentence that follows instead. Either way, others had said it first.

The trail goes back to Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle. In his 1724 essay L’Origine des Fables he wrote, about ancient history, that there are no ancient histories other than these fables. The philosopher Helvétius, in 1758, credited Fontenelle with the saying that history is only une fable convenue, and Voltaire also credited it to him. The word “lies” appears by 1881, in a speech by the American orator Wendell Phillips.

So the fair description is: a saying Napoleon helped make famous, not one he coined. Note too that the French word is fable, not “lie”.

Did Napoleon fire at the pyramids?

Ridley Scott’s 2023 film Napoleon shows his army firing on the pyramids. The historian Joan Tumblety, writing about the film, treats it as an invention: “you don’t need to invent ice traps or Napoleon ordering his men to fire at the pyramids, as Ridley Scott’s biopic does, to convey his callous disregard for life.”

The Battle of the Pyramids was not fought at the pyramids. It took place on 21 July 1798 near the village of Embabeh, about 24 km (15 miles) from the pyramids.

The campaign was heavily documented. Napoleon took a group of 167 scientists with him to Egypt, and their work was published as the Description de l’Égypte, from 1809.

The Sphinx’s nose

The same story is told about the Sphinx: that French gunners shot its nose off. Frederic Louis Norden drew the Sphinx in 1737, and his drawings show the nose already missing; they were published in Voyage d’Égypte et de Nubie in 1755, more than forty years before the French army arrived.

Writing in the early 15th century, the historian al-Maqrizi attributed the damage to a Sufi named Muhammad Sa’im al-Dahr in 1378, who objected to peasants making offerings to the statue. Some Arab writers of the 10th century already blamed the damaged nose on iconoclasts, and examination of the face shows evidence of deliberate work with rods or chisels.

What you can do with this

• Check the units before the conclusion. Napoleon’s “5 ft 2” is a French measurement read as an English one. Old figures in feet, miles or currencies often need converting before they mean anything.
• Look at the timing of losses, not just the total. Minard’s chart shows most of the army gone before the famous winter retreat. The part of a story that is easiest to picture is not always the part that did the damage.
• When a quote sounds too perfect for its speaker, look for an earlier version. The “fable agreed upon” was in print more than half a century before Napoleon used it.
• A dramatic film scene is a prompt to look something up, not a source. The Sphinx story falls apart on dates, and a historian writing about the film calls the pyramid scene an invention.

Sources

• Wikipedia, “Napoleon” (birth, early life, career, Egypt, the coronation, the exiles, Waterloo, death, the 1840 return, reforms), and the works it cites for them: Frank McLynn, Napoleon: A Biography (1997); Adam Zamoyski, Napoleon: The Man Behind the Myth (2018); Andrew Roberts, Napoleon: A Life (2014); Philip Dwyer, Napoleon: The Path to Power (2008), Citizen Emperor (2013) and Napoleon: Passion, Death and Resurrection, 1815–1840 (2018); Steven Englund, Napoleon: A Political Life (2010); Susan P. Conner, The Age of Napoleon (2004); Michael Broers, Napoleon: The Decline and Fall of an Empire (2022); Harold T. Parker, “The Formation of Napoleon’s Personality”, French Historical Studies (1971); Christon Archer and others, World History of Warfare (2008); Alessandro Lugli and others, “The gastric disease of Napoleon Bonaparte”, Virchows Archiv (2021); J. Thomas Hindmarsh and John Savory, “The Death of Napoleon, Cancer or Arsenic?”, Clinical Chemistry (2008).
• Wikipedia, “Napoleon complex” (citing Owen Connelly, Blundering to Glory, 2006, and David A. Bell, Napoleon: A Concise Biography, 2015); History.com, “Was Napoleon Short? Origins of the ‘Napoleon Complex’” (height and French units).
• Fondation Napoléon, “The sacre or consecration of Napoleon I” (the coronation).
• Wikipedia, “French invasion of Russia” (citing Edward Tufte, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, 2001, for Minard’s figures; Carl von Clausewitz, Der Feldzug 1812 in Russland, and Richard K. Riehn, 1812: Napoleon’s Russian Campaign, 1990; the memoirs of General de Caulaincourt; and two US Army studies of disease and winter in the campaign), and Charles Minard’s chart of 1869 itself.
• Institut Pasteur, “Study suggests two unsuspected pathogens struck Napoleon’s army during the retreat from Russia in 1812” (24 October 2025).
• Fondation Napoléon, “Another Napoleonic Mystery: Napoleon’s death”.
• Fondation Napoléon, “Les Invalides : le tombeau de Napoléon” (Karine Huguenot and Marie de Bruchard) (the 1840 funeral, the 1861 transfer and the family tombs); Wikipedia, “Napoleon’s tomb” (citing François Lagrange, “Les Invalides”, L’Objet d’art, 2006, for the granite base); Institut français de Finlande, “Le sarcophage de Napoléon est en Finlande !”.
• Quote Investigator, “What Is History But a Fable Agreed Upon?” (5 July 2016).
• Joan Tumblety, “Did Napoleon really fire at the pyramids?”, The Conversation (17 November 2023).
• Wikipedia, “Great Sphinx of Giza” (citing the Brooklyn Museum’s copy of Norden’s plate of the Sphinx; Christiane Zivie-Coche, Sphinx: History of a Monument; Mark Lehner, The Complete Pyramids, 1997; and, for al-Maqrizi, Arabic Humanities, Islamic Thought, Brill, 2017), and “Frederic Louis Norden” (citing Den Store Danske for the 1755 edition).

Checked September 2026. Wikipedia is used here only where it gives a citation for the sentence, and the work it cites is named above; the Fondation Napoléon is used for the coronation and the tomb. Where sources differ (his exact height, which diseases killed most soldiers in 1812), the page gives the range.