"Come general, the affair is over, we have lost the day," Napoleon told one of his officers. "Let us be off." The day was June 18, 1815. By about 8 p.m., the emperor of France knew he had been ...

In the early 1800s Napoleon Bonaparte stormed across Europe, swallowing up territory for his French Empire and challenging the supremacy of Britain on the seas. From 1804 to 1814, the Napoleonic Wars ...

Long Read'Making peace' (1/6). Le Monde explores how the wars that marked Europe's history over the last 200 years came to an end, starting with the Congress of Vienna, which concluded the Napoleonic ...

Today it is exactly 200 years since Napoleon was narrowly defeated at the Battle of Waterloo by the combined armies of the British and the Prussians. The narrowness of that defeat (until as late as ...

Renowned early-19th century French writer and diplomat François-René de Chateaubriand summed up the fraught ambivalence Napoléon has long provoked: “This man whose genius I admire and whose despotism ...

Bell teaches History at Princeton, and is the author of Napoleon: A Concise Biography On December 2, 1804, Napoleon Bonaparte was preparing to crown himself Emperor of the French in Notre Dame ...

After carefully researching Bonaparte's time in exile, painter Charles de Steuben depicted Napoleon's deathbed and the witnesses to his dying moments in May 1821. “The death of Napoleon” (1828) by ...

We crossed the globe to the tiny, remote island to sample the splendid desolation of the emperor’s exile under a scornful British governor Text by Erica Munkwitz and James L. Swanson; Photographs by ...