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French general and emperor Napoleon Bonaparte.

Napoleon Bonaparte

(1769 - 1821)

In the spring of 1795, Napoleon Bonaparte went to Paris, hoping to obtain a satisfactory command. No offers came, and Napoleon considered providing his services to the Ottoman sultan in Constantinople. That same year he met the widow Joséphine de Beauharnais. After their wedding one year later, Napoleon began his Italian campaign and Josephine began her affair with a Hussar lieutenant. They remained married throughout his own numerous affairs and his coronation as emperor of France in 1804. He had the marriage annulled in 1810 because she failed to provide him with an heir.

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Miscellany

In the late eighteenth century, yellow fever was widespread in the Caribbean; case-fatality rates among British troops there were as high as 70 percent. The fate of French troops sent to Saint-Domingue to suppress a slave rebellion was even worse. “Evidence suggests the troops were actually an expeditionary force with intentions to invade North America through New Orleans and to establish a major holding in the Mississippi valley,” wrote the authors of a 2013 scholarly paper. Mortality from the disease thwarted Napoleon’s “secret ambition to colonize and hold French-held lands, which later became better known as the Louisiana Purchase.”

Voices In Time

1807 | Fontainebleau

Regime Change

Napoleon Bonaparte lays down the law.More

The more religious a country is, the more crimes are committed in it.

—Napoleon Bonaparte, 1817

Man is merely a more perfect animal than the rest. He reasons better.

—Napoleon Bonaparte, 1816

I do not amuse myself by thinking of dead people.

—Napoleon Bonaparte, 1807

Issues Contributed

Rule of Law

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Purchase
Spies

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Eros

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