Napoleon Bonaparte: 15 Frequently Asked Questions

Napoleon Bonaparte was born on August 15, 1769, in Ajaccio on the island of Corsica, just one year after France acquired the territory from the Republic of Genoa. He was the fourth of eight surviving children in the Buonaparte family, minor Italian nobility. His Corsican origins shaped his outsider identity within mainland French society, fueling both his ambition and the prejudice he faced at military school in Brienne and later at the Ecole Militaire in Paris. His early years on Corsica instilled a fierce independence that would define his character throughout his extraordinary rise to power.

Napoleon died on May 5, 1821, on the remote island of Saint Helena in the South Atlantic, where he had been exiled by the British after his defeat at Waterloo. He was 51 years old. The official cause of death was stomach cancer, though arsenic poisoning theories have persisted for decades based on hair sample analyses. He was initially buried on Saint Helena in the Valley of the Willows. In 1840, King Louis-Philippe arranged the return of his remains to France, where they were interred with great ceremony at Les Invalides in Paris — a monument that remains one of the most visited sites in France today.

Napoleon's rise was a product of revolutionary chaos and personal brilliance. After distinguishing himself at the Siege of Toulon in 1793, he gained prominence by suppressing a royalist uprising in Paris in 1795. His spectacular Italian Campaign of 1796-1797 made him a national hero. When the Directory government grew unstable, Napoleon seized his opportunity with the coup of 18 Brumaire on November 9, 1799, overthrowing the government and installing himself as First Consul. Unlike Julius Caesar, who crossed a literal Rubicon, Napoleon's power grab emerged from the institutional vacuum left by the Revolution. By 1804, he had crowned himself Emperor of the French.