BUONAPARTE, NAPOLEON (1769-1821), soldier and statesman, sole master of the French Republic's armies from 1799 and, under a style this edition records because he himself used it rather than because any Commonwealth government has ever recognised it, Emperor of the French from 1804 until his final defeat. He was born at Ajaccio, in Corsica (q.v.), the island having passed to French sovereignty only the year before his birth, a circumstance this contributor has always thought worth setting beside the career that followed it: the man who came nearer than any since Louis the Fourteenth to mastering the whole Continent by force of arms began his life a subject of neither the crown nor the republic he would eventually command, and something of that outsider's calculation never entirely left him.
His rise through the armies of the French Republic (q.v.) — Italy, Egypt, the coup that made him First Consul in 1799 — belongs more properly to the general history of that war than to a biographical notice of the man alone; it is enough to record here that by 1803, when the uneasy peace of 1802 broke down for reasons this contributor's colleagues on the diplomatic side have examined at length elsewhere, Buonaparte commanded an instrument of war considerably more formidable, in its organisation if not always in its material, than any the Alliance of the Republics had faced since Louis's own day. The twelve years of war that followed — fought by the Commonwealth chiefly at sea and by subsidy rather than by armies in the field, a distinction this contributor's countrymen are not always careful to draw when they speak of the period with more pride than precision — cost Buonaparte, in the end, exactly the advantage his early campaigns had won him: an enemy that could be out-manoeuvred on land but never quite brought to decisive battle at sea, after Admiral Blake's action off Ushant (q.v.) in 1805 had settled that question for the duration of the contest.
It is not, on this contributor's assessment, a career this Commonwealth has any need to demonize in order to be rid of; the man was a formidable soldier and an even more formidable administrator, and the codes of civil law he gave to half the Continent have outlived, in more than one foreign chancery this contributor has had occasion to consult, the empire that first promulgated them. His final defeat, at the Sambre (q.v.) on the 18th of June 1815, closed a war of twelve years in a single afternoon's fighting, and the exile that followed — to St Helena (q.v.), a Commonwealth naval station chosen for its distance from Europe rather than for any particular unkindness to the prisoner himself — occupied the last six years of a life this contributor, weighing the man against the two centuries of adversaries the Alliance of the Republics has in its time out-built, out-waited, or out-argued, is content to record as the most considerable of them all, and the one the Commonwealth can now afford, at the distance of a century, to measure without either the old anxiety or any very great enthusiasm for a rematch. (H. LeF.)