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Napoleonic Wars

European history
  • Europe in 1812.

    Europe in 1812.

    Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
  • Europe after the Congress of Vienna (1815). Inset shows the greatest extent of the Napoleonic empire (1812).


    Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.

Learn about this topic in these articles:


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(Dec. 2, 1805), the first engagement of the War of the Third Coalition and one of Napoleon’s greatest victories. His 68,000 troops defeated almost 90,000 Russians and Austrians nominally under General M.I. Kutuzov, forcing Austria to make peace with France (Treaty of Pressburg) and keeping Prussia temporarily out of the anti-French alliance.






(Aug. 26–27, 1813), Napoleon’s last major victory in Germany. It was fought on the outskirts of the Saxon capital of Dresden, between Napoleon’s 120,000 troops and 170,000 Austrians, Prussians, and Russians under Prince Karl Philipp Schwarzenberg.


(Feb. 7–8, 1807), one of the engagements in the Napoleonic War of the Third Coalition. The first major deadlock suffered by Napoleon, the battle was fought around the East Prussian town of Eylau (modern Bagrationovsk, Russia), 23 miles (37 km) south of Königsberg (Kaliningrad). The 76,000 Russians and Prussians under Leonty Leontyevich Bennigsen confronted 74,000 men under Napoleon...


(June 14, 1807), victory for Napoleon that compensated for a setback the preceding February at Eylau and led to the Treaty of Tilsit between Napoleon and Alexander I of Russia. It was fought at Friedland (modern Pravdinsk, Russia), 27 miles (43 km) southeast of Königsberg (now Kaliningrad, Russia) in East Prussia.


(Oct. 14, 1806), military engagement of the Napoleonic Wars, fought between 122,000 French troops and 114,000 Prussians and Saxons, at Jena and Auerstädt, in Saxony (modern Germany). In the battle, Napoleon smashed the outdated Prussian army inherited from Frederick II the Great, which resulted in the reduction of Prussia to half its former size at the Treaty of Tilsit in July 1807.






(June 14, 1800), narrow victory for Napoleon Bonaparte in the War of the Second Coalition, fought on the Marengo Plain about 3 miles (5 km) southeast of Alessandria, in northern Italy, between Napoleon’s approximately 28,000 troops and some 31,000 Austrian troops under General Michael Friedrich von Melas; it resulted in the French occupation of Lombardy up to the Mincio River and secured...


Horatio Nelson.
The French Revolutionary general Napoleon Bonaparte in 1798 made plans for an invasion of Egypt in order to constrict Britain’s trade routes and threaten its possession of India. The British government heard that a large French naval expedition was to sail from a French Mediterranean port under the command of Napoleon, and in response it ordered John Jervis, earl of St. Vincent, the commander...






Battle of Waterloo
(June 18, 1815), Napoleon’s final defeat, ending 23 years of recurrent warfare between France and the other powers of Europe. It was fought during the Hundred Days of Napoleon’s restoration, 3 miles (5 km) south of Waterloo village (which is 9 miles [14.5 km] south of Brussels), between Napoleon’s 72,000 troops and the combined forces of the duke of Wellington’s allied army of 68,000 (with...


Hundred Days


Peninsular War

(1808–14), that part of the Napoleonic Wars fought in the Iberian Peninsula, where the French were opposed by British, Spanish, and Portuguese forces. Napoleon’s peninsula struggle contributed considerably to his eventual downfall; but until 1813 the conflict in Spain and Portugal, though costly, exercised only an indirect effect upon the progress of French affairs in central and eastern...

effect on Stendhal

...This was the beginning of an administrative career in the French army that allowed Henri Beyle to discover parts of Germany and Austria. His army appointment gave him a direct experience of the Napoleonic regime and of Europe at war. He watched Moscow go up in flames, took part in the French forces’ retreat from Russia, and helped organize the military defense of the province of...

history of


...conflict (or preparation for conflict) between Austria and France. During that time Austria and France fought five wars for a total of 14 years, and Austria lost all of them but the last. At one time (1809–12), Austria was stripped of all its Italian possessions, the Austrian Netherlands, its western German...




...create a French-dominated empire in Europe. To this end he moved steadily to consolidate his personal power, proclaiming himself emperor and sketching a new aristocracy. He was almost constantly at war, with Britain his most dogged opponent but Prussia and Austria also joining successive coalitions. Until 1812, his campaigns were usually successful. Although he frequently made errors in...


Napoleon’s sway over France depended from the start on his success in war. After his conquest of northern Italy in 1797 and the dissolution of the first coalition, the Directory intended to invade Britain, France’s century-long rival and the last remaining belligerent. Concluding that French naval power could not sustain a seaborne invasion, however, the government sent Napoleon on a military...


...the Imperial Diet entrusted a committee of princes, the Reichsdeputation, with the task of drawing a new map of Germany. France, however, exercised the major influence over its deliberations. Napoleon had resolved to utilize the settlement of territorial claims to fundamentally alter the structure of the Holy Roman Empire. The result was that the Final Recess (Hauptschluss) of the...






The Napoleonic empire, 1804–14



Ottoman Empire

Expansion of the Ottoman Empire.
...Selim’s energy was diverted by the rise of powerful autonomous notables in southeastern Europe, Anatolia, and the Arab provinces, as well as by a French expedition to Egypt (1798–1801) under Napoleon Bonaparte (later Napoleon I). The French expedition eventually drew Selim into alliances with Great Britain and Russia, through which the French were driven out. The rise of nationalism...


...powers arose. Émigrés looked to Revolutionary France for assistance, and General Jan Henryk Dąbrowski succeeded in 1797 in persuading Napoleon Bonaparte, then waging his Italian campaign, to create auxiliary Polish legions. In their headquarters the future Polish national anthem—“ Jeszcze Polska nie zginęła” (“Poland Has Not...




...1797–1840), pursued at first a foreign policy of caution and neutrality with respect to France and Napoleon I, and, when at last he went to war in 1806, it was too late to avert catastrophe. Napoleon’s overwhelming defeat of the Prussians in the battle of Jena was followed by the rapid collapse of the state. By the Treaty of Tilsit (1807) the king ceded all his possessions west of the...


Königsberg Cathedral, Kaliningrad, Russia.


general who played a prominent role in the Russian Army during the Napoleonic Wars.





United Kingdom

United Kingdom
The Napoleonic Wars were massive in their geographic scope, ranging, as far as Britain was concerned, over all of the five continents. They were massive, too, in terms of expense. From 1793 to the Battle of Waterloo in June 1815 the wars cost Britain more than £1,650,000,000. Only 25 percent of this sum was raised by government loans, the rest coming largely from taxation, not least from...

United States

United States

influence on

art market history

Self-portrait by Banksy.





role of

Alexander I



Pierre-François-Charles Augereau, undated lithograph.

Barclay de Tolly

Russian field marshal who was prominent in the Napoleonic Wars.


Gebhard Leberecht von Blücher, Fürst (prince) von Wahlstatt.
Prussian field marshal, a commander during the Napoleonic Wars, who was important in the Allied victory at Waterloo.






Gouvion-Saint-Cyr, engraving by François-Séraphin Delpech after a portrait by P.-L.-H. Grévedon, 1824
French soldier and statesman who distinguished himself in the Napoleonic Wars (1800–15). As minister of war in 1817–19 he was responsible for reorganizing recruitment procedures in the French army.


Hohenlohe-Ingelfingen, engraving by Wilhelm Arndt, c. 1795
...of Berlin in 1791 and participated in the campaign on the Rhine against revolutionary France in 1794. After war broke out again in 1806, he was given command of one of the two Prussian armies facing Napoleon. Disagreements with the commander in chief, Charles William Ferdinand, duke of Brunswick, caused a disastrous lack of coordination between the two armies. Napoleon practically destroyed...


Mikhail Illarionovich Kutuzov.
Russian army commander who repelled Napoleon’s invasion of Russia (1812).


Jean Lannes, duc de Montebello, lithograph, c. 1830.


Lutzow, lithograph, 1815
(baron of) Prussian major general and a famous, though largely ineffectual, guerrilla leader during the Napoleonic Wars of 1813–15.


Shortly after Napoleon came to power in the coup d’etat of 18 Brumaire (November 9, 1799), Masséna was sent to command the badly demoralized army of Italy. He restored his troops’ fighting spirit, and, by holding out against Austrian besiegers at Genoa from April 21 to June 4, he enabled Napoleon to maneuver into position behind the enemy and win the Battle of Marengo (June 14), forcing...




Joachim Murat, lithograph, c. 1830.




Joseph, Graf Radetzky.
...in the first years of the French Revolutionary Wars. His courage and enterprise were conspicuous from the first. During the Italian campaigns of 1796–97 he took part in operations against Napoleon. In 1805, with the rank of major general, he was given a command in Italy; in 1809 he fought against the French at the Battle of Wagram in Austria, with the rank of lieutenant field marshal;...


Leopold de Rothschild, 1917.



Selim III

Selim III.
...who came to the throne during a war (1787–92) with Austria and Russia, was compelled to conclude the treaties of Sistova (Svishtov; 1791) with Austria and of Jassy (1792) with Russia. In 1798 Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt drove Selim into alliance with Great Britain and Russia. After the French evacuated Egypt (1801), Selim, dazzled by Napoleon’s successes in Europe, not only recognized...


Karl vom Stein, portrait by Friedrich Olivier, 1820
Under the Peace of Tilsit, which mutilated the Prussian state, Frederick William III had to dismiss his minister Karl von Hardenberg at Napoleon’s behest. He then invited Stein to be his chief minister, on Napoleon’s recommendation. Stein arrived at Memel on Sept. 30, 1807, and after interviews with the King his new appointment was confirmed (October 4). Confronted with the extraordinary...



significance of

continuous voyage doctrine




Amiens Treaty


Congress of Vienna

assembly in 1814–15 that reorganized Europe after the Napoleonic Wars. It began in September 1814, five months after Napoleon I’s first abdication and completed its “Final Act” in June 1815, shortly before the Waterloo campaign and the final defeat of Napoleon. The settlement was the most-comprehensive treaty that Europe had ever seen.

Quadruple Alliance of 1813


Treaties of Paris

(1814–15), two treaties signed at Paris respectively in 1814 and 1815 that ended the Napoleonic Wars. The treaty signed on May 30, 1814, was between France on the one side and the Allies (Austria, Great Britain, Prussia, Russia, Sweden, and Portugal) on the other. (Spain made the same treaty with France in July.) Napoleon had abdicated as France’s emperor in April, and the victorious...


Frostbitten hands.


Continental System



...Virginia. Wellington’s operations in Spain were frequently supported by effectively commanded regional bands of guerrillas—perhaps 30,000 in all—who made life miserable for the French invaders by blocking roads, intercepting couriers, and at times even waging conventional war. In 1812, in the long retreat from Moscow, the armies of Napoleon I suffered thousands of casualties...


Jomini’s discussion of logistics was really an analysis of the functions of the Napoleonic general staff, which he conceived as the commander’s right arm, facilitating his decisions and seeing to their execution. The mobility and gargantuan scale of Napoleonic warfare had left the simple old logistics of marches and encampments far behind. The new logistics, said Jomini, had become the science...


Napoleonic Wars
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