A hereditary monarchy is the most common type of monarchy and is the form that is used by almost all of the world's existing monarchies.

Under a hereditary monarchy, all the monarchs come from the same family, and the crown is passed down from one member to another member of the family. The hereditary system has the advantages of stability, continuity and predictability, as well as the internal stabilizing factors of family affection and loyalty.

For example, when the king or queen of a hereditary monarchy dies or abdicates, the crown is usually passed to the next generation, i.e., his or her child, typically in some order of seniority. When that child dies, the crown is in turn passed to his or her child, or, if no child exists, a sister, brother, niece, nephew, cousin, or other relative. Hereditary monarchies most usually arrange succession by a legislated, definite order of succession so that it is well-known beforehand who will be the next monarch. Nowadays, the typical order of succession in hereditary monarchies is based on some form of primogeniture, but there exist other methods such as seniority, tanistry and rotation, which were much more common in the past.

Historically, there have been differences in systems of succession, mainly revolving around the question of whether succession is limited only to males, or if females are also eligible to succeed. Agnatic succession refers to systems where females are neither allowed to succeed nor to transmit the succession rights to their male descendants (see Salic Law). An ''agnate'' is a kinsman with whom one has a common ancestor by descent in unbroken male line. Cognatic succession previously referred to any succession to the throne or other inheritance which allows both males and females to be heirs, although in modern usage it specifically refers to equal succession by seniority regardless of gender.

Elective monarchy can practically function as a hereditary monarchy, for example in case of eligibility being limited to members of one family (or even further, if allowed by the rules of precedence in the election). This has happened historically, usually slowly, in many past elective monarchies. One method was for the incumbent monarch to have his chosen heir (son, daughter, brother, sister, or other relative) elected during the lifetime of the incumbent, while he was still able to wield his influence to direct the election to the desired result.

Many late-medieval countries of Europe were officially elective monarchies, but the same family had held the throne already even centuries, and that hybrid situation should be described as pseudo-elective, virtually hereditary monarchies, the succession system being in slow transition. Most of those hybrid monarchies became officially hereditary in early modern age.

See also

List of hereditary monarchies

Absolute monarchy

Elective monarchy

Heir apparent

Heir presumptive

Order of succession

Royal family

Inheritance

Posthumous birth

Category:Monarchy

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Region	Western philosophy
Era	18th-century philosophy
Color	#B0C4DE
Name	Thomas Paine
Birth date	February 9, 1737
Birth place	Thetford, Norfolk, England, Great Britain
Death date	June 08, 1809
Death place	New York City
School tradition	Enlightenment, Liberalism, Radicalism, Republicanism
Main interests	Religion, Ethics, Politics
Signature	Thomas Paine Signature.svg
Influences	Voltaire, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, John Locke, Religious Society of Friends, Montesquieu, Benjamin Franklin
Influenced	Thomas Jefferson, William Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft, Pierre Victurnien Vergniaud, Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Edison, Mahatma Phule, Moncure D. Conway, Bertrand Russell, Christopher Hitchens, Robert G. Ingersoll }}

Thomas "Tom" Paine ( June 8, 1809) was an author, pamphleteer, radical, inventor, intellectual, revolutionary, and one of the Founding Fathers of the United States. He has been called "a corsetmaker by trade, a journalist by profession, and a propagandist by inclination."

Born in Thetford, in the English county of Norfolk, Paine emigrated to the British American colonies in 1774 in time to participate in the American Revolution. His principal contributions were the powerful, widely read pamphlet ''Common Sense'' (1776), the all-time best-selling American book that advocated colonial America's independence from the Kingdom of Great Britain, and ''The American Crisis'' (1776–1783), a pro-revolutionary pamphlet series. His writing of "Common Sense" was so influential that John Adams reportedly said, "Without the pen of the author of 'Common Sense,' the sword of Washington would have been raised in vain.”

In 1789 Paine visited France, and lived there for much of the following decade. He was deeply involved in the early stages of the French Revolution. He wrote the ''Rights of Man'' (1791), in part a defence of the French Revolution against its critics, in particular the British statesman Edmund Burke. In Great Britain, for this publication he was later tried and convicted ''in absentia'' for the crime of seditious libel. Despite not speaking French, he was elected to the French National Convention in 1792. The Girondists regarded him as an ally, so, the Montagnards, especially Robespierre, regarded him as an enemy. In December of 1793, he was arrested and imprisoned in Paris, then released in 1794. He became notorious because of ''The Age of Reason'' (1793–94), his book that advocates deism, promotes reason and freethinking, argues against institutionalized religion and Christian doctrines. He also wrote the pamphlet ''Agrarian Justice'' (1795), discussing the origins of property, and introduced the concept of a guaranteed minimum income.

Paine remained in France during the early Napoleonic era, but condemned Napoleon's dictatorship, calling him "the completest charlatan that ever existed". In 1802, at President Jefferson's invitation, he returned to America where he died on June 8, 1809. Only six people attended his funeral as he had been ostracized due to his criticism and ridicule of Christianity.

Early life

Paine was born the son of Joseph Pain, or Paine, a Quaker, and Frances (née Cocke), an Anglican, in Thetford, an important market town and coach stage-post, in rural Norfolk, England. Born Thomas Pain, despite claims that he changed his family name upon his emigration to America in 1774, he was using Paine in 1769, whilst still in Lewes, Sussex.

He attended Thetford Grammar School (1744–1749), at a time when there was no compulsory education. At age thirteen, he was apprenticed to his stay-maker father; in late adolescence, he enlisted and briefly served as a privateer, before returning to Britain in 1759. There, he became a master stay-maker, establishing a shop in Sandwich, Kent. On September 27, 1759, Thomas Paine married Mary Lambert. His business collapsed soon after. Mary became pregnant, and, after they moved to Margate, she went into early labor, in which she and their child died.

In July 1761, Paine returned to Thetford to work as a supernumerary officer. In December 1762, he became an excise officer in Grantham, Lincolnshire; in August 1764, he was transferred to Alford, at a salary of £50 per annum. On August 27, 1765, he was fired as an Excise Officer for "claiming to have inspected goods he did not inspect." On July 31, 1766, he requested his reinstatement from the Board of Excise, which they granted the next day, upon vacancy. While awaiting that, he worked as a stay maker in Diss, Norfolk, and later as a servant (per the records, for a Mr. Noble, of Goodman's Fields, and for a Mr. Gardiner, at Kensington). He also applied to become an ordained minister of the Church of England and, per some accounts, he preached in Moorfields.

In 1767, he was appointed to a position in Grampound, Cornwall; subsequently, he asked to leave this post to await a vacancy, thus, he became a schoolteacher in London. On February 19, 1768, he was appointed to Lewes, East Sussex, living above the fifteenth-century Bull House, the tobacco shop of Samuel Ollive and Esther Ollive.

There, Paine first became involved in civic matters, when Samuel Ollive introduced him to the Society of Twelve, a local, élite intellectual group that met semestrally, to discuss town politics. He also was in the influential vestry church group that collected taxes and tithes to distribute among the poor. On March 26, 1771, at age 34, he married Elizabeth Ollive, his landlord's daughter.

From 1772 to 1773, Paine joined excise officers asking Parliament for better pay and working conditions, publishing, in summer of 1772, ''The Case of the Officers of Excise'', a twenty-one-page article, and his first political work, spending the London winter distributing the 4,000 copies printed to the Parliament and others. In spring of 1774, he was fired from the excise service for being absent from his post without permission; his tobacco shop failed, too. On April 14, to avoid debtor's prison, he sold his household possessions to pay debts. On June 4, he formally separated from wife Elizabeth and moved to London, where, in September, the mathematician, Fellow of the Royal Society, and Commissioner of the Excise George Lewis Scott introduced him to Benjamin Franklin, who suggested emigration to British colonial America, and gave him a letter of recommendation. In October, Thomas Paine emigrated from Great Britain to the American colonies, arriving in Philadelphia on November 30, 1774.

He barely survived the transatlantic voyage. The ship's water supplies were bad, and typhoid fever killed five passengers. On arriving at Philadelphia, he was too sick to debark. Benjamin Franklin's physician, there to welcome Paine to America, had him carried off ship; Paine took six weeks to recover his health. He became a citizen of Pennsylvania "by taking the oath of allegiance at a very early period." In January, 1775, he became editor of the Pennsylvania Magazine, a position he conducted with considerable ability.

Paine designed the Sunderland Bridge of 1796 over the Wear River at Wearmouth, England. It was patterned after the model he had made for the Schuylkill River Bridge at Philadelphia in 1787, and the Sunderland arch became the prototype for many subsequent voussoir arches made in iron and steel. He also received a British patent for a single-span iron bridge, developed a smokeless candle, and worked with inventor John Fitch in developing steam engines.

American Revolution

Common Sense (1776)

Thomas Paine has a claim to the title ''The Father of the American Revolution'' because of ''Common Sense'', the pro-independence monograph pamphlet he anonymously published on January 10, 1776; signed ''"Written by an Englishman"'', the pamphlet became an immediate success. It quickly spread among the literate, and, in three months, 100,000 copies (estimated 500,000 total including pirated editions sold during the course of the Revolution) sold throughout the American British colonies (with only two million free inhabitants), making it the best-selling book ever. Paine's original title for the pamphlet was ''Plain Truth''; Paine's friend, pro-independence advocate Benjamin Rush, suggested ''Common Sense'' instead.

The pamphlet appeared in January 1776, after the Revolution had started. It was passed around, and often read aloud in taverns, contributing significantly to spreading the idea of republicanism, bolstering enthusiasm for separation from Britain, and encouraging recruitment for the Continental Army. Paine provided a new and convincing argument for independence by advocating a complete break with history. ''Common Sense'' is oriented to the future in a way that compels the reader to make an immediate choice. It offers a solution for Americans disgusted and alarmed at the threat of tyranny.

Paine was not expressing original ideas in ''Common Sense'', but rather employing rhetoric as a means to arouse resentment of the Crown. To achieve these ends, he pioneered a style of political writing suited to the democratic society he envisioned, with ''Common Sense'' serving as a primary example. Part of Paine's work was to render complex ideas intelligible to average readers of the day, with clear, concise writing unlike the formal, learned style favored by many of Paine's contemporaries. Scholars have put forward various explanations to account for its success, including the historic moment, Paine's easy-to-understand style, his democratic ethos, and his use of psychology and ideology.

''Common Sense'' was immensely popular in disseminating to a very wide audience ideas that were already in common use among the elite who comprised Congress and the leadership cadre of the emerging nation. They rarely cited Paine's arguments in their public calls for independence. The pamphlet probably had little direct influence on the Continental Congress's decision to issue a Declaration of Independence, since that body was more concerned with how declaring independence would affect the war effort. Paine's great contribution was in initiating a public debate about independence, which had previously been rather muted.

Loyalists vigorously attacked ''Common Sense''; one attack, titled ''Plain Truth'' (1776), by Marylander James Chalmers, said Paine was a political quack and warned that without monarchy, the government would "degenerate into democracy". Even some American revolutionaries objected to ''Common Sense''; late in life John Adams called it a "crapulous mass." Adams disagreed with the type of radical democracy promoted by Paine (that men who did not own property should still be allowed to vote and hold public office), and published ''Thoughts on Government'' in 1776 to advocate a more conservative approach to republicanism.

Crisis (1776)

In late 1776 Paine published ''The Crisis'' pamphlet series, to inspire the Americans in their battles against the British army. He juxtaposed the conflict between the good American devoted to civic virtue and the selfish provincial man. To inspire his soldiers, General George Washington had ''The American Crisis'', first ''Crisis'' pamphlet, read aloud to them. It begins:

Foreign Affairs

In 1777, Paine became secretary of the Congressional Committee on Foreign Affairs. The following year, he alluded to continuing secret negotiation with France in his pamphlets; the resultant scandal and Paine's conflict with Robert Morris eventually led to Paine's expulsion from the Committee in 1779. However, in 1781, he accompanied John Laurens on his mission to France. Eventually, after much pleading from Paine, New York State recognised his political services by presenting him with an estate, at New Rochelle, New York, and Paine received money from Pennsylvania and from the US Congress at George Washington's suggestion. During the Revolutionary War, Paine served as an aide to the important general, Nathanael Greene. Paine's later years established him as "a missionary of world revolution."

Funding the Revolution

Paine accompanied Col. John Laurens to France and is credited with initiating the mission. It landed in France in March 1781 and returned to America in August with 2.5 million livres in silver, as part of a "present" of 6 million and a loan of 10 million. The meetings with the French king were most likely conducted in the company and under the influence of Benjamin Franklin. Upon returning to the United States with this highly welcomed cargo, Thomas Paine and probably Col. Laurens, "positively objected" that General Washington should propose that Congress remunerate him for his services, for fear of setting "a bad precedent and an improper mode." Paine made influential acquaintances in Paris, and helped organize the Bank of North America to raise money to supply the army. In 1785, he was given $3,000 by the U.S. Congress in recognition of his service to the nation.

Henry Laurens (the father of Col. John Laurens) had been the ambassador to the Netherlands, but he was captured by the British on his return trip there. When he was later exchanged for the prisoner Lord Cornwallis (in late 1781), Paine proceeded to the Netherlands to continue the loan negotiations. There remains some question as to the relationship of Henry Laurens and Thomas Paine to Robert Morris as the Superintendent of Finance and his business associate Thomas Willing who became the first president of the Bank of North America (in Jan. 1782). They had accused Morris of profiteering in 1779 and Willing had voted against the Declaration of Independence. Although Morris did much to restore his reputation in 1780 and 1781, the credit for obtaining these critical loans to "organize" the Bank of North America for approval by Congress in December 1781 should go to Henry or John Laurens and Thomas Paine more than to Robert Morris.

Paine bought his only house in 1783 on the corner of Farnsworth Avenue and Church Streets in Bordentown City, New Jersey, and he lived in it periodically until his death in 1809. This is the only place in the world where Paine purchased real estate.

''Rights of Man''

Having taken work as a clerk after his expulsion by Congress, Paine eventually returned to London in 1787, living a largely private life. However, his passion was again sparked by revolution, this time in France, which he visited in 1790. Edmund Burke, who had supported the American Revolution, did not likewise support the events taking place in France, and wrote the critical ''Reflections on the Revolution in France'', partially in response to a sermon by Richard Price, the radical minister of Newington Green Unitarian Church. Many pens rushed to defend the Revolution and the Dissenting clergyman, including Mary Wollstonecraft, who published ''A Vindication of the Rights of Men'' only weeks after the ''Reflections''. Paine wrote ''Rights of Man'', an abstract political tract critical of monarchies and European social institutions. He completed the text on January 29, 1791. On January 31, he gave the manuscript to publisher Joseph Johnson for publication on February 22. Meanwhile, government agents visited him, and, sensing dangerous political controversy, he reneged on his promise to sell the book on publication day; Paine quickly negotiated with publisher J.S. Jordan, then went to Paris, per William Blake's advice, leaving three good friends, William Godwin, Thomas Brand Hollis, and Thomas Holcroft, charged with concluding publication in Britain. The book appeared on March 13, three weeks later than scheduled, and sold well.

Undeterred by the government campaign to discredit him, Paine issued his ''Rights of Man, Part the Second, Combining Principle and Practice'' in February 1792. It detailed a representative government with enumerated social programs to remedy the numbing poverty of commoners through progressive tax measures. Radically reduced in price to ensure unprecedented circulation, it was sensational in its impact and gave birth to reform societies. An indictment for seditious libel followed, for both publisher and author, while government agents followed Paine and instigated mobs, hate meetings, and burnings in effigy. The authorities aimed, with ultimate success, to chase Paine out of Great Britain. He was then tried ''in absentia'', found guilty though never executed.

In summer of 1792, he answered the sedition and libel charges thus: "If, to expose the fraud and imposition of monarchy ... to promote universal peace, civilization, and commerce, and to break the chains of political superstition, and raise degraded man to his proper rank; if these things be libellous ... let the name of libeller be engraved on my tomb".

Paine was an enthusiastic supporter of the French Revolution, and was granted, along with Alexander Hamilton, George Washington, Benjamin Franklin and others, honorary French citizenship. Despite his inability to speak French, he was elected to the National Convention, representing the district of Pas-de-Calais. He voted for the French Republic; but argued against the execution of Louis XVI, saying that he should instead be exiled to the United States: firstly, because of the way royalist France had come to the aid of the American Revolution; and secondly because of a moral objection to capital punishment in general and to revenge killings in particular. He participated to the Constitution Committee that drafted the Girondin constitutional project.

Regarded as an ally of the Girondins, he was seen with increasing disfavor by the Montagnards who were now in power, and in particular by Robespierre. A decree was passed at the end of 1793 excluding foreigners from their places in the Convention (Anacharsis Cloots was also deprived of his place). Paine was arrested and imprisoned in December 1793.

''The Age of Reason''

Before his arrest and imprisonment in France, knowing that he would probably be arrested and executed, Paine, following in the tradition of early eighteenth-century British deism, wrote the first part of ''The Age of Reason'', an assault on organized "revealed" religion combining a compilation of inconsistencies he found in the Bible with his own advocacy of deism, calling for "free rational inquiry" into all subjects, especially religion. ''The Age of Reason'' critique on institutionalized religion resulted in only a brief upsurge in deistic thought in America, but would later result in Paine being derided by the public and abandoned by his friends. In his "Autobiographical Interlude," which is found in ''The Age of Reason'' between the first and second parts, Paine writes, "Thus far I had written on the December 28, 1793. In the evening I went to the Hotel Philadelphia ... About four in the morning I was awakened by a rapping at my chamber door; when I opened it, I saw a guard and the master of the hotel with them. The guard told me they came to put me under arrestation and to demand the key of my papers. I desired them to walk in, and I would dress myself and go with them immediately."

Being held in France, Paine protested and claimed that he was a citizen of America, which was an ally of Revolutionary France, rather than of Great Britain, which was by that time at war with France. However, Gouverneur Morris, the American ambassador to France, did not press his claim, and Paine later wrote that Morris had connived at his imprisonment. Paine thought that George Washington had abandoned him, and he was to quarrel with Washington for the rest of his life. Years later he wrote a scathing open letter to Washington, accusing him of private betrayal of their friendship and public hypocrisy as general and president, and concluding the letter by saying "the world will be puzzled to decide whether you are an apostate or an impostor; whether you have abandoned good principles or whether you ever had any."

While in prison, Paine narrowly escaped execution. A guard walked through the prison placing a chalk mark on the doors of the prisoners who were due to be sent to the guillotine the next day. He placed a 4 on the door of Paine's cell, but Paine's door had been left open to let a breeze in, because Paine was seriously ill at the time. That night, his other three cell mates closed the door, thus hiding the mark inside the cell. The next day their cell was overlooked. "The Angel of Death" had passed over Paine. He kept his head and survived the few vital days needed to be spared by the fall of Robespierre on 9 Thermidor (July 27, 1794).

Paine was released in November 1794 largely because of the work of the new American Minister to France, James Monroe, who successfully argued the case for Paine's American citizenship. In July 1795, he was re-admitted into the Convention, as were other surviving Girondins. Paine was one of only three députés to oppose the adoption of the new 1795 constitution, because it eliminated universal suffrage, which had been proclaimed by the Montagnard Constitution of 1793.

In 1797, Tom Paine lived in Paris with Nicholas Bonneville and his wife, Margaret. Paine, as well as Bonneville's other controversial guests, aroused the suspicions of authorities. Bonneville hid the Royalist Antoine Joseph Barruel-Beauvert at his home and employed him as a proofreader. Beauvert had been outlawed following the coup of 18 Fructidor on September 4, 1797. Paine believed that America, under John Adams, had betrayed revolutionary France. Bonneville was then briefly jailed for comparing Napoleon Bonaparte to Oliver Cromwell, in his publication 'The Well Informed of 19 Brumaire Year VIII,' and his presses were confiscated, which meant financial ruin.

In 1800, still under police surveillance, Bonneville took refuge with his father in Evreux. Paine stayed on with him, helping Bonneville with the burden of translating the Covenant Sea. The same year, Paine purportedly had a meeting with Napoleon. Napoleon claimed he slept with a copy of ''Rights of Man'' under his pillow and went so far as to say to Paine that "a statue of gold should be erected to you in every city in the universe." Paine discussed with Napoleon how best to invade England and in December 1797 wrote two essays, one of which was pointedly named ''Observations on the Construction and Operation of Navies with a Plan for an Invasion of England and the Final Overthrow of the English Government'', in which he promoted the idea to finance 1000 gunboats to carry a French invading army across the English Channel. In 1804 Paine returned to the subject, writing ''To the People of England on the Invasion of England'' advocating the idea.

On noting Napoleon's progress towards dictatorship, he condemned him as: "the completest charlatan that ever existed". Thomas Paine remained in France until 1802, returning to the United States only at President Jefferson's invitation.

Later years

In 1802 or 1803, Tom Paine left France for the United States, paying passage also for Bonneville's wife, Marguerite Brazier and their three sons, seven year old Benjamin, Louis, and Thomas, of whom Paine was godfather. Paine returned to the US in the early stages of the Second Great Awakening and a time of great political partisanship. The ''Age of Reason'' gave ample excuse for the religiously devout to dislike him, and the Federalists attacked him for his ideas of government stated in ''Common Sense,'' for his association with the French Revolution, and for his friendship with President Jefferson. Also still fresh in the minds of the public was his ''Letter to Washington,'' published six years before his return.

Upon his return to America, Paine penned 'On the Origins of Freemasonry.' Nicholas Bonneville printed the essay in French. It was not printed in English until 1810, when Marguerite posthumously published his essay, which she had culled from among his papers, as a pamphlet containing an edited version wherein she omitted his references to the Christian religion. The document was published in English in its entirety in New York in 1918.

Brazier took care of Paine at the end of his life and buried him on his death on June 8, 1809. In his will, Paine left the bulk of his estate to Marguerite, including 100 acres (40.5 ha) of his farm so she could maintain and educate Benjamin and his brother Thomas. In 1810, The fall of Napoleon finally allowed Bonneville to rejoin his wife in the United States where he remained for four years before returning to Paris to open a bookshop.

Death

Paine died at the age of 72, at 59 Grove Street in Greenwich Village, New York City on the morning of June 8, 1809. Although the original building is no longer there, the present building has a plaque noting that Paine died at this location.

After his death, Paine's body was brought to New Rochelle, but no Christian church would receive it for burial, so his remains were buried under a walnut tree on his farm. In 1819, the English agrarian radical journalist William Cobbett dug up his bones and transported them back to England, with plans for English democrats to give Paine a heroic reburial on his native soil, but this never came to pass. The bones were still among Cobbett's effects when he died over twenty years later, but were later lost. There is no confirmed story about what happened to them after that, although down the years various people have claimed to own parts of Paine's remains, such as his skull and right hand.

At the time of his death, most American newspapers reprinted the obituary notice from the ''New York Citizen'', which read in part: "He had lived long, did some good and much harm." Only six mourners came to his funeral, two of whom were black, most likely freedmen. The writer and orator Robert G. Ingersoll wrote:

Thomas Paine had passed the legendary limit of life. One by one most of his old friends and acquaintances had deserted him. Maligned on every side, execrated, shunned and abhorred – his virtues denounced as vices – his services forgotten – his character blackened, he preserved the poise and balance of his soul. He was a victim of the people, but his convictions remained unshaken. He was still a soldier in the army of freedom, and still tried to enlighten and civilize those who were impatiently waiting for his death. Even those who loved their enemies hated him, their friend – the friend of the whole world – with all their hearts. On the 8th of June, 1809, death came – Death, almost his only friend. At his funeral no pomp, no pageantry, no civic procession, no military display. In a carriage, a woman and her son who had lived on the bounty of the dead – on horseback, a Quaker, the humanity of whose heart dominated the creed of his head – and, following on foot, two negroes filled with gratitude – constituted the funeral cortege of Thomas Paine.

Political views

Thomas Paine developed his natural justice beliefs in childhood, while listening to a mob jeering and attacking the town folk being punished in the Thetford stocks. He may also have been influenced by his Quaker father. In ''The Age of Reason'' his treatise supporting deism he says:

The religion that approaches the nearest of all others to true deism, in the moral and benign part thereof, is that professed by the Quakers ... though I revere their philanthropy, I cannot help smiling at [their] conceit; ... if the taste of a Quaker [had] been consulted at the Creation, what a silent and drab-colored Creation it would have been! Not a flower would have blossomed its gaieties, nor a bird been permitted to sing.

Later, his encounters with the Indigenous peoples of the Americas made a deep impression. The ability of the Iroquois to live in harmony with nature while achieving a democratic decision making process, helped him refine his thinking on how to organize society.

In the second part of ''The Age of Reason'', about his sickness in prison, he says: "... I was seized with a fever, that, in its progress, had every symptom of becoming mortal, and from the effects of which I am not recovered. It was then that I remembered, with renewed satisfaction, and congratulated myself most sincerely, on having written the former part of 'The Age of Reason'". This quotation encapsulates its gist:

The opinions I have advanced ... are the effect of the most clear and long-established conviction that the Bible and the Testament are impositions upon the world, that the fall of man, the account of Jesus Christ being the Son of God, and of his dying to appease the wrath of God, and of salvation, by that strange means, are all fabulous inventions, dishonorable to the wisdom and power of the Almighty; that the only true religion is Deism, by which I then meant, and mean now, the belief of one God, and an imitation of his moral character, or the practice of what are called moral virtues and that it was upon this only (so far as religion is concerned) that I rested all my hopes of happiness hereafter. So say I now and so help me God.

Paine is often credited with writing "African Slavery in America", the first article proposing the emancipation of African slaves and the abolition of slavery. It was published on March 8, 1775 in the ''Postscript to the Pennsylvania Journal and Weekly Advertiser'' (aka ''The Pennsylvania Magazine'' and ''American Museum''). Citing a lack of evidence that Paine was the author of this anonymously published essay, some scholars (Eric Foner and Alfred Owen Aldridge) no longer consider this one of his works. Others believe it bears the hallmarks of Paine's rhetorical style with its Biblical cadences and plain language. By contrast, John Nichols speculates that his "fervent objections to slavery" led to his exclusion from power during the early years of the Republic.

His last, great pamphlet, ''Agrarian Justice'', he published in winter of 1795, further developing the ideas in the ''Rights of Man'', about how land ownership separated the majority of people from their rightful, natural inheritance, and means of independent survival. Contemporarily, his proposal is deemed a form of basic Income Guarantee. The US Social Security Administration recognizes ''Agrarian Justice'' as the first American proposal for an old-age pension; per ''Agrarian Justice'':

In advocating the case of the persons thus dispossessed, it is a right, and not a charity ... [Government must] create a national fund, out of which there shall be paid to every person, when arrived at the age of twenty-one years, the sum of fifteen pounds sterling, as a compensation in part, for the loss of his or her natural inheritance, by the introduction of the system of landed property. And also, the sum of ten pounds per annum, during life, to every person now living, of the age of fifty years, and to all others as they shall arrive at that age.

Note that £10 and £15 would be worth about £800 and £1,200 when adjusted for inflation.

Religious views

About religion, ''The Age of Reason'' says:

Though there is no evidence he was himself a Freemason, Paine also wrote "An Essay on the Origin of Free-Masonry" (1803–1805), about the Bible being allegorical myth describing astrology:

He described himself as deist, saying:

How different is [Christianity] to the pure and simple profession of Deism! The true Deist has but one Deity, and his religion consists in contemplating the power, wisdom, and benignity of the Deity in his works, and in endeavoring to imitate him in everything moral, scientifical, and mechanical.

and again, in ''The Age of Reason:''

Legacy

Thomas Paine's writing greatly influenced his contemporaries and, especially, the American revolutionaries. His books provoked only a brief upsurge in Deism in America, but in the long term inspired philosophic and working-class radicals in the UK, and US liberals, libertarians, feminists, democratic socialists, social democrats, anarchists, freethinkers, and progressives often claim him as an intellectual ancestor. Paine's critique on institutionalized religion and advocation of rational thinking influenced many British freethinkers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, such as William Cobbett, George Holyoake, Charles Bradlaugh and Bertrand Russell.

Many of Paine's works have also been an inspiration for rapidly expanding secular humanism. His Deism and his writings on Deism have inspired the creation of the World Union of Deists and the writing of the book ''Deism: A Revolution in Religion, A Revolution in You''.

The quote "Lead, follow, or get out of the way" is widely but incorrectly attributed to Paine. This can be found nowhere in his published works.

Lincoln

Abraham Lincoln's law partner, William Herndon, reports that Lincoln wrote a defense of Paine's deism in 1835, and friend Samuel Hill burned it to save Lincoln's political career. Historian Roy Basler, the editor of Lincoln's papers, said Paine had a strong influence on Lincoln's style: :No other writer of the eighteenth century, with the exception of Jefferson, parallels more closely the temper or gist of Lincoln's later thought. In style, Paine above all others affords the variety of eloquence which, chastened and adapted to Lincoln's own mood, is revealed in Lincoln's formal writings.

Edison

The inventor Thomas Edison said:

I have always regarded Paine as one of the greatest of all Americans. Never have we had a sounder intelligence in this republic ... It was my good fortune to encounter Thomas Paine's works in my boyhood ... it was, indeed, a revelation to me to read that great thinker's views on political and theological subjects. Paine educated me, then, about many matters of which I had never before thought. I remember, very vividly, the flash of enlightenment that shone from Paine's writings, and I recall thinking, at that time, 'What a pity these works are not today the schoolbooks for all children!' My interest in Paine was not satisfied by my first reading of his works. I went back to them time and again, just as I have done since my boyhood days.

Memorials

The first and longest standing memorial to Thomas Paine is the carved and inscribed 12 foot marble column in New Rochelle, New York organized and funded by publisher, educator and reformer Gilbert Vale (1791–1866) and raised in 1839 by the American sculptor and architect James Frazee—The Thomas Paine Monument (see image below). New Rochelle is also the original site of Paine's 300 acre farm, confiscated by the State of New York from the Tory and monarchist Frederick Davoe and awarded to Paine for his services in the American Revolution. The same site is the home of the Thomas Paine Museum, whose holdings—the subject of a sell-off controversy—were temporarily relocated to the New York Historical Society and are now safely and more permanently archived in the Iona College Library.

In England a statue of Paine, quill pen and inverted copy of ''Rights of Man'' in hand, stands in King Street, Thetford, Norfolk, his birth place. Moreover, in Thetford, the Sixth form is named after him. Thomas Paine was ranked #34 in the ''100 Greatest Britons'' 2002 extensive Nationwide poll conducted by the BBC

Bronx Community College includes Paine in its Hall of Fame of Great Americans, and there are statues of Paine in Morristown and Bordentown, New Jersey, and in the Parc Montsouris, in Paris.

Also in Paris, there is a plaque in the street where he lived from 1797 to 1802, that says: "Thomas PAINE / 1737–1809 / Englishman by birth / American by adoption / French by decree".

Yearly, between July 4 and 14, the Lewes Town Council in the United Kingdom celebrates the life and work of Thomas Paine.

In the early 1990s, largely through the efforts of citizen activist David Henley of Virginia, legislation (S.Con.Res 110, and H.R. 1628) was introduced in the 102nd Congress by ideological opposites Sen. Steve Symms (R-ID) and Rep. Nita Lowey (D-NY). With over 100 formal letters of endorsement by US and foreign historians, philosophers, and organizations, including the Thomas Paine National Historical Society, the legislation garnered 78 original co-sponsors in the Senate and 230 original co-sponsors in the House of Representatives, and was consequently passed by both houses unanimous consent. In October, 1992 the legislation was signed into law (PL102-407 & PL102-459) by President George H.W. Bush authorizing the construction, using private funds, of a memorial to Thomas Paine in "Area 1" of the grounds of the US Capitol. , the memorial has not yet been built.

In popular culture

Jack Shepherd's stage play ''In Lambeth'' dramatised a visit by Thomas Paine to the Lambeth home of William and Catherine Blake in 1789, first performed at the East Dulwich Tavern in London in July 1989. The play was later adapted for television in the BBC Two ''Encounters'' series - which featured similar fictionalised meetings between historical figures - and was first broadcast on 4 July 1993. It was directed by Sebastian Graham-Jones, and featured Bob Peck as Paine, Mark Rylance as William, and Lesley Claire O'Neill as Katherine (sic).

See also

American Enlightenment

American philosophy

American Revolution

Asset-based egalitarianism

Common Sense

Contributions to liberal theory

Deism

English philosophy

Founding Fathers of the United States

Liberalism

Liberty

List of American philosophers

List of British philosophers

Political philosophy

Society of the Friends of Truth

United States Bill of Rights

United States Declaration of Independence

United States history

References

;Notes

;Bibliography

Aldridge, A. Owen, 1959. ''Man of Reason: The Life of Thomas Paine.'' Lippincott. Regarded by British authorities as the standard biography.

Aldridge, A. Owen, 1984. ''Thomas Paine's American Ideology''. University of Delaware Press.

Ayer, A. J., 1988. ''Thomas Paine''. University of Chicago Press.

Bailyn, Bernard, 1990. "Common Sense", in Bailyn, ''Faces of Revolution: Personalities and Themes in the Struggle for American Independence''. Alfred A. Knopf.

Bernstein, R. B. "Review Essay: Rediscovering Thomas Paine". ''New York Law School Law Review,'' 1994 – valuable blend of historiographical essay and biographical/analytical treatment.

Butler, Marilyn, 1984. ''Burke Paine and Godwin and the Revolution Controversy''.

Claeys, Gregory, 1989. ''Thomas Paine, Social and Political Thought''. Unwin Hyman. Excellent analysis of Paine's thought.

Conway, Moncure Daniel, 1892. ''The Life of Thomas Paine'', 2 vols. G.P. Putnam's Sons. Vol. 1, Vol. 2, Facsimile. Long hailed as the definitive biography, and still valuable.

Fast, Howard, 1946. ''Citizen Tom Paine'' (historical novel, though sometimes mistaken as biography).

Ferguson, Robert A. "The Commonalities of Common Sense", ''William and Mary Quarterly,'' July 2000, Vol. 57#3 pp 465–504 in JSTOR

Foner, Eric, 1976. ''Tom Paine and Revolutionary America''. Oxford University Press. The standard monograph treating Paine's thought and work with regard to America.

Foot, Michael, and Kramnick, Isaac, 1987. ''The Thomas Paine Reader''. Penguin Classics.

Hawke, David Freeman, 1974. ''Paine''. Regarded by many American authorities as the standard biography.

Hitchens, Christopher, 2006. ''Thomas Paine's "Rights of Man": A Biography''.

Ingersoll, Robert G., 1892, "Thomas Paine," ''North American Review''.

Kates, Gary, 1989, "From Liberalism to Radicalism: Tom Paine's Rights of Man", ''Journal of the History of Ideas'': 569–587.

Kaye, Harvey J., 2005. ''Thomas Paine and the Promise of America''. Hill and Wang.

Keane, John, 1995. ''Tom Paine: A Political Life''. London. One of the most valuable recent studies.

Larkin, Edward, 2005. ''Thomas Paine and the Literature of Revolution.'' Cambridge University Press.

Lessay, Jean. L'américain de la Convention, Thomas Paine: Professeur de révolutions. Paris, éditions Perrin, 1987, 241 p.

Lewis, Joseph, 1947, "Thomas Paine: The Author of the Declaration of Independence". Freethought Association Press Assn.: New York.

Nelson, Craig, 2006. ''Thomas Paine: Enlightenment, Revolution, and the Birth of Modern Nations''. Viking. ISBN 0-670-03788-5.

Paine, Thomas (Foner, Eric, editor), 1993. ''Writings.'' Library of America. Authoritative and scholarly edition containing ''Common Sense,'' the essays comprising the ''American Crisis'' series, ''Rights of Man,'' ''The Age of Reason,'' ''Agrarian Justice,'' and selected briefer writings, with authoritative texts and careful annotation.

Paine, Thomas (Foner, Philip S., editor), 1944. ''The Complete Writings of Thomas Paine,'' 2 volumes. Citadel Press. We badly need a complete edition of Paine's writings on the model of Eric Foner's edition for the Library of America, but until that goal is achieved, Philip Foner's two-volume edition is a serviceable substitute. Volume I contains the major works, and volume II contains shorter writings, both published essays and a selection of letters, but confusingly organized; in addition, Foner's attributions of writings to Paine have come in for some criticism in that Foner may have included writings that Paine edited but did not write and omitted some writings that later scholars have attributed to Paine.

Powell, David, 1985. ''Tom Paine, The Greatest Exile''. Hutchinson.

Vincent, Bernard, 2005. ''The Transatlantic Republican: Thomas Paine and the age of revolutions''.

Williams, Walton, July, 1994. "The Declaration of Independence: Was it Written by Thomas Paine?" The Crooked Lake Review (Reprinted from the Hammondsport Herald, July 6, 1906), crookedlakereview.com

Wheeler, Daniel, ''Life and Writings of Thomas Paine,'' Vincent & Parke, 1908.

''The Popular Encyclopedia'' London: Blackie & Sons 1875. "Thomas Paine"

External links

The Thomas Paine Society

Who was Thomas Paine?

Essays on the Religious and Political Philosophy of Thomas Paine

Thomas Paine's Memorial

Thomas Paine Quotations

Books of Our Time: Thomas Paine and the Promise of America by Harvey Kaye (video)

Take a video tour of Thomas Paine's birthplace

Office location while in Alford

Thomas Paine-Passionate Pamphleteer for Liberty by Jim Powell

Thomas Paine on Paper Money, 1786

Thomas Paine, Liberty's Hated Torchbearer

Lesson plan – ''Common Sense'': The Rhetoric of Popular Democracy

Books of Our Time: Thomas Paine and the Promise of America (video)

Correspondence between Paine and Samuel Adams regarding the charge of ''infidelity''

One Life: Thomas Paine, the Radical Founding Father exhibition from the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

;Works

Complete Works of Thomas Paine

Deistic and Religious Works of Thomas Paine

The theological works of Thomas Paine

The theological works of Thomas Paine to which are appended the profession of faith of a savoyard vicar by J.J. Rousseau

''Common Sense'' by Thomas Paine; HTML format, indexed by section

Rights of Man book on Google books (full-view)

Listen to Common Sense at Americana Phonic. AAC audio format

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{{infobox royalty|realm	france
Name	Napoleon I
Imgw	250
Alt	Full length portrait of Napoleon in his forties, in high-ranking white and dark blue military dress uniform. He stands amid rich 18th century furniture laden with papers, and gazes at the viewer. His hair is Brutus style, cropped close but with a short fringe in front, and his right hand is tucked in his waistcoat.
Succession	Emperor of the French
Reign	18 May 1804 – 11 April 1814()20 March 1815 – 22 June 1815 ( days)
Coronation	2 December 1804
Cor-type	france
Full name	Napoleon Bonaparte
Predecessor	None (himself as First Consul of the French First Republic; previous ruling monarch was Louis XVI)
Successor	Louis XVIII (''de jure'' in 1814)
Succession1	King of Italy
Reign1	17 March 1805 – 11 April 1814
Coronation1	26 May 1805
Predecessor1	None (himself as President of the Italian Republic; previous ruling monarch was Emperor Charles V)
Successor1	None (kingdom disbanded, next king of Italy was Victor Emmanuel II)
Spouse	Joséphine de BeauharnaisMarie Louise of Austria
Issue	Napoleon II
House	House of Bonaparte
Father	Carlo Buonaparte
Mother	Letizia Ramolino
Birth date	August 15, 1769
Birth place	Ajaccio, Corsica
Death date	May 05, 1821
Death place	Longwood, Saint Helena, British Empire
Place of burial	Les Invalides, Paris
Religion	Roman Catholicism (but see Napoleon and religions)
Signature	Firma Napoleón Bonaparte.svg

Napoleon Bonaparte (15 August 1769 – 5 May 1821) was a French military and political leader during the latter stages of the French Revolution. As Napoleon I, he was Emperor of the French from 1804 to 1815. His legal reform, the Napoleonic code, has been a major influence on many civil law jurisdictions worldwide, but he is best remembered for his role in the wars led against France by a series of coalitions, the so-called Napoleonic Wars, during which he established hegemony over most of continental Europe and sought to spread the ideals of the French Revolution, while consolidating an increasingly autocratic, hereditary empire. Due to his longtime success in these wars, often against numerically superior enemies, he is generally regarded as one of the greatest military commanders of all time.

Napoleon was born in Corsica to parents of noble Genoese ancestry and trained as an artillery officer in mainland France. Bonaparte rose to prominence under the French First Republic and led successful campaigns against the First and Second Coalitions arrayed against France. In 1799, he staged a ''coup d'état'' and installed himself as First Consul; five years later the French Senate proclaimed him emperor. In the first decade of the 19th century, the French Empire under Napoleon engaged in a series of conflicts—the Napoleonic Wars—involving every major European power. After a streak of victories, France secured a dominant position in continental Europe, and Napoleon maintained the French sphere of influence through the formation of extensive alliances and the appointment of friends and family members to rule other European countries as French client states. Napoleon's campaigns are studied at military academies throughout much of the world.

The fight against the guerilla in Spain and 1812 French invasion of Russia marked turning points in Napoleon's fortunes. His ''Grande Armée'' was badly damaged in the campaign and never fully recovered. In 1813, the Sixth Coalition defeated his forces at Leipzig; the following year the Coalition invaded France, forced Napoleon to abdicate and exiled him to the island of Elba. Less than a year later, he escaped Elba and returned to power, but was defeated at the Battle of Waterloo in June 1815. Napoleon spent the last six years of his life in confinement by the British on the island of Saint Helena. An autopsy concluded he died of stomach cancer, although this claim has sparked significant debate, and some scholars (most notably Sten Forshufvud) have held that he was a victim of arsenic poisoning.

Origins and education

Napoleon Bonaparte was born the second of eight children in his family's ancestral home Casa Buonaparte, located in the town of Ajaccio, Corsica. He was born on 15 August 1769, one year after Corsica was transferred to France by the Republic of Genoa. He was christened ''Napoleone di Buonaparte'', probably acquiring his first name from an uncle (though an older brother, who did not survive infancy, was also named Napoleone). He was called by this name until his twenties, when he adopted the more French-sounding ''Napoléon Bonaparte''.

The Corsican Buonapartes originated from minor Italian nobility of Lombard origin, who had come to Corsica from Liguria in the 16th century. His father ''Nobile'' Carlo Buonaparte, an attorney, was named Corsica's representative to the court of Louis XVI in 1777. The dominant influence of Napoleon's childhood was his mother, Letizia Ramolino, whose firm discipline restrained a rambunctious child. He had an elder brother, Joseph; and younger siblings Lucien, Elisa, Louis, Pauline, Caroline and Jérôme. There were also two other children, a boy and girl, who were born before Joseph but died in infancy. Napoleon was baptised as a Catholic just before his second birthday, on 21 July 1771 at Ajaccio Cathedral.

Napoleon's noble, moderately affluent background and family connections afforded him greater opportunities to study than were available to a typical Corsican of the time. In January 1779, Napoleon was enrolled at a religious school in Autun, mainland France, to learn French, and in May he was admitted to a military academy at Brienne-le-Château. He spoke with a marked Corsican accent and never learned to spell properly. Napoleon was teased by other students for his accent and applied himself to reading. An examiner observed that Napoleon "has always been distinguished for his application in mathematics. He is fairly well acquainted with history and geography...This boy would make an excellent sailor." On completion of his studies at Brienne in 1784, Napoleon was admitted to the elite ''École Militaire'' in Paris; this ended his naval ambition, which had led him to consider an application to the British Royal Navy. Instead, he trained to become an artillery officer and when his father's death reduced his income, was forced to complete the two-year course in one year. He was the first Corsican to graduate from the Ecole Militaire and was examined by the famed scientist Pierre-Simon Laplace, whom Napoleon later appointed to the Senate.

Early career

Upon graduating in September 1785, Bonaparte was commissioned a Second Lieutenant in ''La Fère'' artillery regiment. He served on garrison duty in Valence, Drôme and Auxonne until after the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789, though he took nearly two years' leave in Corsica and Paris during this period. A fervent Corsican nationalist, Bonaparte wrote to the Corsican leader Pasquale Paoli in May 1789: "As the nation was perishing I was born. Thirty thousand Frenchmen were vomited on to our shores, drowning the throne of liberty in waves of blood. Such was the odious sight which was the first to strike me."

He spent the early years of the Revolution in Corsica, fighting in a complex three-way struggle between royalists, revolutionaries, and Corsican nationalists. He supported the revolutionary Jacobin faction, gained the rank of Lieutenant Colonel and command over a battalion of volunteers. After he had exceeded his leave of absence and led a riot against a French army in Corsica, he was somehow able to convince military authorities in Paris to promote him to captain in July 1792. He returned to Corsica once again and came into conflict with Paoli, who had decided to split with France and sabotage a French assault on the Sardinian island of La Maddalena, where Bonaparte was one of the expedition leaders. Bonaparte and his family had to flee to the French mainland in June 1793 because of the split with Paoli.

Siege of Toulon

In July 1793, he published a pro-republican pamphlet, ''Le Souper de Beaucaire'' (Supper at Beaucaire), which gained him the admiration and support of Augustin Robespierre, younger brother of the Revolutionary leader Maximilien Robespierre. With the help of fellow Corsican Antoine Christophe Saliceti, Bonaparte was appointed artillery commander of the republican forces at the siege of Toulon. The city had risen against the republican government and was occupied by British troops. He adopted a plan to capture a hill that would allow republican guns to dominate the city's harbour and force the British ships to evacuate. The assault on the position, during which Bonaparte was wounded in the thigh, led to the capture of the city and his promotion to Brigadier General at the age of 24. His actions brought him to the attention of the Committee of Public Safety, and he was put in charge of the artillery of France's Army of Italy. Whilst waiting for confirmation of this post, Napoleon spent time as inspector of coastal fortifications on the Mediterranean coast near Marseille. He devised plans for attacking Piedmont as part of France's campaign against the First coalition and was then sent on a mission, by Augustin, to the Republic of Genoa, to understand that country's intentions towards France.

13 Vendémiaire

Following the fall of the Robespierres in the July 1794 Thermidorian Reaction, Bonaparte was put under house arrest at Nice for his association with the brothers. He was released within two weeks and due to his technical skills was asked to draw-up plans to attack Italian positions in the context of France's war with Austria. He also took part in an expedition to take back Corsica from the British, but the French were repulsed by the Royal Navy.

Bonaparate became engaged to Désirée Clary, whose sister, Julie Clary, married Bonaparte's elder brother Joseph; the Clarys were a wealthy merchant family from Marseilles. In April 1795, he was assigned to the Army of the West, which was engaged in the War in the Vendée—a civil war and royalist counter-revolution in Vendée, a region in west central France, on the Atlantic Ocean. As an infantry command, it was a demotion from artillery general – for which the army already had a full quota – and he pleaded poor health to avoid the posting. He was moved to the Bureau of Topography of the Committee of Public Safety and sought, unsuccessfully, to be transferred to Constantinople in order to offer his services to the Sultan. During this period he wrote a romantic novella, ''Clisson et Eugénie'', about a soldier and his lover, in a clear parallel to Bonaparte's own relationship with Désirée. On 15 September, Bonaparte was removed from the list of generals in regular service for his refusal to serve in the Vendée campaign. He now faced a difficult financial situation and reduced career prospects.

On 3 October, royalists in Paris declared a rebellion against the National Convention after they were excluded from a new government, the Directory. One of the leaders of the Thermidorian Reaction, Paul Barras, knew of Bonaparte's military exploits at Toulon and gave him command of the improvised forces in defence of the Convention in the Tuileries Palace. Bonaparte had witnessed the massacre of the King's Swiss Guard there three years earlier and realised artillery would be the key to its defence. He ordered a young cavalry officer, Joachim Murat, to seize large cannons and used them to repel the attackers on 5 October 1795—''13 Vendémiaire An IV'' in the French Republican Calendar. One thousand four hundred royalists died, and the rest fled. He had cleared the streets with "a whiff of grapeshot", according to the 19th century historian Thomas Carlyle in ''The French Revolution: A History''.

The defeat of the Royalist insurrection extinguished the threat to the Convention and earned Bonaparte sudden fame, wealth, and the patronage of the new Directory; Murat would become his brother-in-law and one of his generals. Bonaparte was promoted to Commander of the Interior and given command of the Army of Italy. Within weeks he was romantically attached to Barras's former mistress, Joséphine de Beauharnais, whom he married on 9 March 1796 after he had broken off his engagement to Désirée Clary.

First Italian campaign

Two days after the marriage, Bonaparte left Paris to take command of the Army of Italy and led it on a successful invasion of Italy. At the Battle of Lodi he defeated Austrian forces and drove them out of Lombardy. He was defeated at Caldiero by Austrian reinforcements, led by József Alvinczi, though Bonaparte regained the initiative at the crucial Battle of the Bridge of Arcole and proceeded to subdue the Papal States. Bonaparte argued against the wishes of Directory atheists to march on Rome and dethrone the Pope as he reasoned this would create a power vacuum which would be exploited by the Kingdom of Naples. Instead, in March 1797, Bonaparte led his army into Austria and forced it to negotiate peace. The Treaty of Leoben gave France control of most of northern Italy and the Low Countries, and a secret clause promised the Republic of Venice to Austria. Bonaparte marched on Venice and forced its surrender, ending 1,100 years of independence; he also authorised the French to loot treasures such as the Horses of Saint Mark.

His application of conventional military ideas to real-world situations effected his military triumphs, such as creative use of artillery as a mobile force to support his infantry. He referred to his tactics thus: "I have fought sixty battles and I have learned nothing which I did not know at the beginning. Look at Caesar; he fought the first like the last." He was adept at espionage and deception and could win battles by concealment of troop deployments and concentration of his forces on the 'hinge' of an enemy's weakened front. If he could not use his favourite envelopment strategy, he would take up the central position and attack two co-operating forces at their hinge, swing round to fight one until it fled, then turn to face the other. In this Italian campaign, Bonaparte's army captured 150,000 prisoners, 540 cannons and 170 standards. The French army fought 67 actions and won 18 pitched battles through superior artillery technology and Bonaparte's tactics.

During the campaign, Bonaparte became increasingly influential in French politics; he founded two newspapers both for the troops in his army and also for circulation in France. The royalists attacked Bonaparte for looting Italy and warned he might become a dictator. Bonaparte sent General Pierre Augereau to Paris to lead a ''coup d'état'' and purge the royalists on 4 September—Coup of 18 Fructidor. This left Barras and his Republican allies in control again but dependent on Bonaparte who proceeded to peace negotiations with Austria. These negotiations resulted in the Treaty of Campo Formio, and Bonaparte returned to Paris in December as a hero. He met with Talleyrand, France's new Foreign Minister—who would later serve in the same capacity for Emperor Napoleon—and they began to prepare for an invasion of England.

Egyptian expedition

After two months of planning, Bonaparte decided France's naval power was not yet strong enough to confront the Royal Navy in the English Channel and proposed a military expedition to seize Egypt and thereby undermine Britain's access to its trade interests in India. Bonaparte wished to establish a French presence in the Middle East, with the ultimate dream of linking with a Muslim enemy of the British in India, Tipu Sultan. Napoleon assured the Directory that "as soon as he had conquered Egypt, he will establish relations with the Indian princes and, together with them, attack the English in their possessions." According to a February 1798 report by Talleyrand: "Having occupied and fortified Egypt, we shall send a force of 15,000 men from Suez to India, to join the forces of Tipu-Sahib and drive away the English." The Directory agreed in order to secure a trade route to India.

In May 1798, Bonaparte was elected a member of the French Academy of Sciences. His Egyptian expedition included a group of 167 scientists: mathematicians, naturalists, chemists and geodesists among them; their discoveries included the Rosetta Stone, and their work was published in the ''Description de l'Égypte'' in 1809.

En route to Egypt, Bonaparte reached Malta on 9 June 1798, then controlled by the Knights Hospitaller. The two hundred Knights of French origin did not support the Grand Master, Prussian Ferdinand von Hompesch zu Bolheim, who had succeeded a Frenchman and made it clear they would not fight against their compatriots. Hompesch surrendered after token resistance, and Bonaparte captured a very important naval base with the loss of only three men. General Bonaparte and his expedition eluded pursuit by the Royal Navy and on 1 July landed at Alexandria. He fought the Battle of Chobrakit against the Mamluks, Egypt's ruling military caste. This helped the French practice their defensive tactic for the Battle of the Pyramids fought on 21 July, about 24 km from the pyramids. General Bonaparte's forces of 25,000 roughly equalled those of the Mamluks' Egyptian cavalry, but he formed hollow squares with supplies kept safely inside. 29 French and approximately 2,000 Egyptians were killed. The victory boosted the morale of the French army.

On 1 August, the British fleet under Horatio Nelson captured or destroyed all but two French vessels in the Battle of the Nile, and Bonaparte's goal of a strengthened French position in the Mediterranean was frustrated. His army had succeeded in a temporary increase of French power in Egypt, though it faced repeated uprisings. In early 1799, he moved an army into the Ottoman province of Damascus (Syria and Galilee). Bonaparte led these 13,000 French soldiers in the conquest of the coastal towns of Arish, Gaza, Jaffa, and Haifa. The attack on Jaffa was particularly brutal: Bonaparte, on discovering many of the defenders were former prisoners of war, ostensibly on parole, ordered the garrison and 1,400 prisoners to be executed by bayonet or drowning to save bullets. Men, women and children were robbed and murdered for three days.

With his army weakened by disease—mostly bubonic plague—and poor supplies, Bonaparte was unable to reduce the fortress of Acre and returned to Egypt in May. To speed up the retreat, he ordered plague-stricken men to be poisoned. (However, British eyewitness accounts later showed that most of the men were still alive and had not been poisoned.) His supporters have argued this was necessary given the continued harassment of stragglers by Ottoman forces, and indeed those left behind alive were tortured and beheaded by the Ottomans. Back in Egypt, on 25 July, Bonaparte defeated an Ottoman amphibious invasion at Abukir.

Ruler of France

While in Egypt, Bonaparte stayed informed of European affairs through irregular delivery of newspapers and dispatches. He learned France had suffered a series of defeats in the War of the Second Coalition. On 24 August 1799, he took advantage of the temporary departure of British ships from French coastal ports and set sail for France, despite the fact he had received no explicit orders from Paris. The army was left in the charge of Jean Baptiste Kléber. Unknown to Bonaparte, the Directory had sent him orders to return to ward off possible invasions of French soil, but poor lines of communication meant the messages had failed to reach him. By the time he reached Paris in October France's situation had been improved by a series of victories. The Republic was bankrupt, however, and the ineffective Directory was unpopular with the French population. The Directory discussed Bonaparte's "desertion" but was too weak to punish him.

Bonaparte was approached by one of the Directors, Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès, for his support in a coup to overthrow the constitutional government. The leaders of the plot included his brother Lucien; the speaker of the Council of Five Hundred, Roger Ducos; another Director, Joseph Fouché; and Talleyrand. On 9 November—18 Brumaire by the French Republican Calendar—Bonaparte was charged with the safety of the legislative councils, who were persuaded to remove to the Château de Saint-Cloud, to the west of Paris, after a rumour of a Jacobin rebellion was spread by the plotters. By the following day, the deputies had realised they faced an attempted coup. Faced with their remonstrations, Bonaparte led troops to seize control and disperse them, which left a rump legislature to name Bonaparte, Sieyès, and Ducos as provisional Consuls to administer the government.

French Consulate

Though Sieyès expected to dominate the new regime, he was outmanoeuvred by Bonaparte, who drafted the Constitution of the Year VIII and secured his own election as First Consul, and he took up residence at the Tuileries. This made Bonaparte the most powerful person in France.

In 1800, Bonaparte and his troops crossed the Alps into Italy, where French forces had been almost completely driven out by the Austrians whilst he was in Egypt. The campaign began badly for the French after Bonaparte made strategic errors; one force was left besieged at Genoa but managed to hold out and thereby occupy Austrian resources. This effort, and French general Louis Desaix's timely reinforcements, allowed Bonaparte narrowly to avoid defeat and to triumph over the Austrians in June at the significant Battle of Marengo. Bonaparte's brother Joseph led the peace negotiations in Lunéville and reported that Austria, emboldened by British support, would not recognise France's newly gained territory. As negotiations became increasingly fractious, Bonaparte gave orders to his general Moreau to strike Austria once more. Moreau led France to victory at Hohenlinden. As a result, the Treaty of Lunéville was signed in February 1801; the French gains of the Treaty of Campo Formio were reaffirmed and increased.

Temporary peace in Europe

Bonaparte set up a camp at Boulogne-sur-Mer to prepare for an invasion of Britain, but both countries had become tired of war and signed the Treaty of Amiens in October 1801 and March 1802; this included the withdrawal of British troops from most colonial territories it had recently occupied. The dispute culminated in a declaration of war by Britain in May 1803, and he reassembled the invasion camp at Boulogne.

Bonaparte faced a major setback and eventual defeat in the Haitian Revolution. By the Law of 20 May 1802 Bonaparte re-established slavery in France's colonial possessions, where it had been banned following the Revolution. Following a slave revolt, he sent an army to reconquer Saint-Domingue and establish a base. The force was, however, destroyed by yellow fever and fierce resistance led by Haitian generals Toussaint Louverture and Jean-Jacques Dessalines. Faced by imminent war against Britain and bankruptcy, he recognised French possessions on the mainland of North America would be indefensible and sold them to the United States—the Louisiana Purchase—for less than three cents per acre ($7.40 per km²).

Reforms

Bonaparte instituted lasting reforms, including higher education, a tax code, road and sewer systems, and established the Banque de France (central bank). He negotiated the Concordat of 1801 with the Catholic Church, which sought to reconcile the mostly Catholic population to his regime. It was presented alongside the Organic Articles, which regulated public worship in France. Later that year, Bonaparte became President of the French Academy of Sciences and appointed Jean Baptiste Joseph Delambre its Permanent Secretary. In May 1802, he instituted the Legion of Honour, a substitute for the old royalist decorations and orders of chivalry, to encourage civilian and military achievements; the order is still the highest decoration in France. His powers were increased by the Constitution of the Year X including: ''Article 1. The French people name, and the Senate proclaims Napoleon-Bonaparte First Consul for Life.'' After this he was generally referred to as Napoleon rather than Bonaparte.

Napoleon's set of civil laws, the ''Code Civil''—now often known as the Napoleonic code—was prepared by committees of legal experts under the supervision of Jean Jacques Régis de Cambacérès, the ''Second Consul''. Napoleon participated actively in the sessions of the Council of State that revised the drafts. The development of the code was a fundamental change in the nature of the civil law legal system with its stress on clearly written and accessible law. Other codes were commissioned by Napoleon to codify criminal and commerce law; a Code of Criminal Instruction was published, which enacted rules of due process. See ''Legacy''.

Metric system

The official introduction of the metric system in September 1799 was unpopular in large sections of French society, and Napoleon's rule greatly aided adoption of the new standard across not only France but the French sphere of influence. Napoleon ultimately took a retrograde step in 1812 when he passed legislation to introduce the ''mesures usuelles'' (traditional units of measurement) for retail trade – a system of measure that resembled the pre-revolutionary units but were based on the kilogram and the metre; for example the ''livre metrique'' (metric pound) was 500 g instead of 489.5 g – the value of the ''livre du roi'' (the king's pound). Other units of measure were rounded in a similar manner. This however laid the foundations for the definitive introduction of the metric system across Europe in the middle of the 19th century.

Napoleonic Code

The Napoleonic code was adopted throughout much of Europe, though only in the lands he conquered, and remained in force after Napoleon's defeat. Napoleon said: "My true glory is not to have won 40 battles...Waterloo will erase the memory of so many victories. ... But...what will live forever, is my Civil Code." The Code still has importance today in a quarter of the world's jurisdictions including in Europe, the Americas and Africa. Dieter Langewiesche described the code as a "revolutionary project" which spurred the development of bourgeois society in Germany by the extension of the right to own property and an acceleration towards the end of feudalism. Napoleon reorganised what had been the Holy Roman Empire, made up of more than a thousand entities, into a more streamlined forty-state Confederation of the Rhine; this provided the basis for the German Confederation and the unification of Germany in 1871. The movement toward national unification in Italy was similarly precipitated by Napoleonic rule. These changes contributed to the development of nationalism and the nation state.

Concordat

Seeking national reconciliation between revolutionaries and Catholics, the Concordat of 1801 was signed on 15 July 1801 between Napoleon and Pope Pius VII. It solidified the Roman Catholic Church as the majority church of France and brought back most of its civil status.

During the French Revolution, the National Assembly had taken Church properties and issued the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, which made the Church a department of the State, removing it from the authority of the Pope. This caused hostility among the Vendeans towards the change in the relationship between the Catholic Church and the French government. Subsequent laws abolished the traditional Gregorian calendar and Christian holidays.

While the Concordat restored some ties to the papacy, it was largely in favor of the state; the balance of church-state relations had tilted firmly in Napoleon's favour. Now, Napoleon could win favor with the Catholics within France while also controlling Rome in a political sense. Napoleon once told his brother Lucien in April 1801, "Skillful conquerors have not got entangled with priests. They can both contain them and use them." As a part of the Concordat, he presented another set of laws called the Organic Articles.

Jewish emancipation

Napoleon emancipated Jews (as well as Protestants in Catholic countries and Catholics in Protestant countries) from laws which restricted them to ghettos, and he expanded their rights to property, worship, and careers. Despite the anti-semitic reaction to Napoleon's policies from foreign governments and within France, he believed emancipation would benefit France by attracting Jews to the country given the restrictions they faced elsewhere. He stated, "I will never accept any proposals that will obligate the Jewish people to leave France, because to me the Jews are the same as any other citizen in our country. It takes weakness to chase them out of the country, but it takes strength to assimilate them." He was seen as so favourable to the Jews that the Russian Orthodox Church formally condemned him as "Antichrist and the Enemy of God".

French Empire

Napoleon faced royalist and Jacobin plots as France's ruler, including the ''Conspiration des poignards'' (Dagger plot) in October 1800 and the Plot of the Rue Saint-Nicaise (also known as the ''infernal machine'') two months later. In January 1804, his police uncovered an assassination plot against him which involved Moreau and which was ostensibly sponsored by the Bourbon former rulers of France. On the advice of Talleyrand, Napoleon ordered the kidnapping of Louis Antoine, Duke of Enghien, in violation of neighbouring Baden's sovereignty. After a secret trial the Duke was executed, even though he had not been involved in the plot.

Napoleon used the plot to justify the re-creation of a hereditary monarchy in France, with himself as emperor, as a Bourbon restoration would be more difficult if the Bonapartist succession was entrenched in the constitution. Napoleon crowned himself Emperor Napoleon I on 2 December 1804 at Notre Dame de Paris and then crowned Joséphine Empress. The story that he seized the crown out of the hands of Pope Pius VII during the ceremony to avoid his subjugation to the authority of the pontiff is apocryphal; the coronation procedure had been agreed in advance. At Milan Cathedral on 26 May 1805, Napoleon was crowned King of Italy with the Iron Crown of Lombardy. He created eighteen ''Marshals of the Empire'' from amongst his top generals, to secure the allegiance of the army. Ludwig van Beethoven, a long-time admirer, was disappointed at this turn towards imperialism and scratched his dedication to Napoleon from his 3rd Symphony.

War of the Third Coalition

By 1805, Britain had convinced Austria and Russia to join a Third Coalition against France. Napoleon knew the French fleet could not defeat the Royal Navy in a head-to-head battle and planned to lure it away from the English Channel. The French Navy would escape from the British blockades of Toulon and Brest and threaten to attack the West Indies, thus drawing off the British defence of the Western Approaches, in the hope a Franco-Spanish fleet could take control of the channel long enough for French armies to cross from Boulogne and invade England. However, after defeat at the naval Battle of Cape Finisterre in July 1805 and Admiral Villeneuve's retreat to Cadiz, invasion was never again a realistic option for Napoleon.

Instead, he ordered the army stationed at Boulogne, his ''Grande Armée'', to march to Germany secretly in a turning movement—the Ulm Campaign. This encircled the Austrian forces about to attack France and severed their lines of communication. On 20 October 1805, the French captured 30,000 prisoners at Ulm, though the next day Britain's victory at the Battle of Trafalgar meant the Royal Navy gained control of the seas. Six weeks later, on the first anniversary of his coronation, Napoleon defeated Austria and Russia at Austerlitz. This ended the Third Coalition, and he commissioned the Arc de Triomphe to commemorate the victory. Austria had to concede territory; the Peace of Pressburg led to the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire and creation of the Confederation of the Rhine with Napoleon named as its ''Protector''.

Napoleon would go on to say, "The battle of Austerlitz is the finest of all I have fought." Frank McLynn suggests Napoleon was so successful at Austerlitz he lost touch with reality, and what used to be French foreign policy became a "personal Napoleonic one". Vincent Cronin disagrees, stating Napoleon was not overly ambitious for himself, that "he embodied the ambitions of thirty million Frenchmen".

Middle-Eastern alliances

Even after the failed campaign in Egypt, Napoleon continued to entertain a grand scheme to establish a French presence in the Middle East. An alliance with Middle-Eastern powers would have the strategic advantage of pressuring Russia on its southern border. From 1803, Napoleon went to considerable lengths to try to convince the Ottoman Empire to fight against Russia in the Balkans and join his anti-Russian coalition. Napoleon sent General Horace Sebastiani as envoy extraordinary, promising to help the Ottoman Empire recover lost territories. In February 1806, following Napoleon's victory at Austerlitz and the ensuing dismemberment of the Habsburg Empire, the Ottoman Emperor Selim III finally recognised Napoleon as Emperor, formally opting for an alliance with France ''"our sincere and natural ally"'', and war with Russia and England. A Franco-Persian alliance was also formed, from 1807 to 1809, between Napoleon and the Persian Empire of Fat′h-Ali Shah Qajar, against Russia and Great Britain. The alliance ended when France allied with Russia and turned its focus to European campaigns.

War of the Fourth Coalition

The Fourth Coalition was assembled in 1806, and Napoleon defeated Prussia at the Battle of Jena-Auerstedt in October. He marched against advancing Russian armies through Poland and was involved in the bloody stalemate of the Battle of Eylau on 6 February 1807.

After a decisive victory at Friedland, he signed the Treaties of Tilsit; one with Tsar Alexander I of Russia which divided the continent between the two powers; the other with Prussia which stripped that country of half its territory. Napoleon placed puppet rulers on the thrones of German states, including his brother Jérôme as king of the new Kingdom of Westphalia. In the French-controlled part of Poland, he established the Duchy of Warsaw with King Frederick Augustus I of Saxony as ruler.

With his Milan and Berlin Decrees, Napoleon attempted to enforce a Europe-wide commercial boycott of Britain called the ''Continental System''. This act of economic warfare did not succeed, as it encouraged British merchants to smuggle into continental Europe, and Napoleon's exclusively land-based customs enforcers could not stop them.

Peninsular War

Portugal did not comply with the Continental System, so in 1807 Napoleon invaded with the support of Spain. Under the pretext of a reinforcement of the Franco-Spanish army occupying Portugal, Napoleon invaded Spain as well, replaced Charles IV with his brother Joseph and placed his brother-in-law Joachim Murat in Joseph's stead at Naples. This led to resistance from the Spanish army and civilians in the Dos de Mayo Uprising. Following a French retreat from much of the country, Napoleon took command and defeated the Spanish Army. He retook Madrid, then outmanoeuvred a British army sent to support the Spanish and drove it to the coast. Before the Spanish population had been fully subdued, Austria again threatened war, and Napoleon returned to France. The costly and often brutal Peninsular War continued in Napoleon's absence; in the second Siege of Saragossa most of the city was destroyed and over 50,000 people perished. Although Napoleon left 300,000 of his finest troops to battle Spanish guerrillas as well as British and Portuguese forces commanded by Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington, French control over the peninsula again deteriorated. Following several allied victories, the war concluded after Napoleon's abdication in 1814. Napoleon later described the Peninsular War as central to his final defeat, writing in his memoirs "That unfortunate war destroyed me... All... my disasters are bound up in that fatal knot."

War of the Fifth Coalition and remarriage

In April 1809, Austria abruptly broke its alliance with France, and Napoleon was forced to assume command of forces on the Danube and German fronts. After early successes, the French faced difficulties in crossing the Danube and suffered a defeat in May at the Battle of Aspern-Essling near Vienna. The Austrians failed to capitalise on the situation and allowed Napoleon's forces to regroup. He defeated the Austrians again at Wagram, and the Treaty of Schönbrunn was signed between Austria and France.

Britain was the other member of the coalition. In addition to the Iberian Peninsula, the British planned to open another front in mainland Europe. However, Napoleon was able to rush reinforcements to Antwerp, owing to Britain's inadequately organised Walcheren Campaign. He concurrently annexed the Papal States because of the Church's refusal to support the Continental System; Pope Pius VII responded by excommunicating the emperor. The pope was then abducted by Napoleon's officers, and though Napoleon had not ordered his abduction, he did not order Pius' release. The pope was moved throughout Napoleon's territories, sometimes while ill, and Napoleon sent delegations to pressure him on issues including agreement to a new concordat with France, which Pius refused. In 1810 Napoleon married Archduchess Marie Louise of Austria, following his divorce of Joséphine; this further strained his relations with the Church, and thirteen cardinals were imprisoned for non-attendance at the marriage ceremony. The pope remained confined for 5 years and did not return to Rome until May 1814. Napoleon consented to the ascent to the Swedish throne of Bernadotte, one of his marshals and a long-term rival of Napoleon's, in November 1810. Napoleon had indulged Bernadotte's indiscretions because he was married to Désirée Clary but came to regret sparing his life when Bernadotte later allied Sweden with France's enemies.

Invasion of Russia

The Congress of Erfurt sought to preserve the Russo-French alliance, and the leaders had a friendly personal relationship after their first meeting at Tilsit in 1807. By 1811, however, tensions had increased and Alexander was under pressure from the Russian nobility to break off the alliance. An early sign the relationship had deteriorated was the Russian's virtual abandonment of the Continental System, which led Napoleon to threaten Alexander with serious consequences if he formed an alliance with Britain. By 1812, advisers to Alexander suggested the possibility of an invasion of the French Empire and the recapture of Poland. On receipt of intelligence reports on Russia's war preparations, Napoleon expanded his ''Grande Armée'' to more than 450,000 men. He ignored repeated advice against an invasion of the Russian heartland and prepared for an offensive campaign; on 23 June 1812 the invasion commenced.

In an attempt to gain increased support from Polish nationalists and patriots, Napoleon termed the war the ''Second Polish War''—the ''First Polish War'' had been the Bar Confederation uprising by Polish nobles against Russia in 1768. Polish patriots wanted the Russian part of Poland to be joined with the Duchy of Warsaw and an independent Poland created. This was rejected by Napoleon, who stated he had promised his ally Austria this would not happen. Napoleon refused to manumit the Russian serfs because of concerns this might provoke a reaction in his army's rear. The serfs later committed atrocities against French soldiers during France's retreat.

The Russians avoided Napoleon's objective of a decisive engagement and instead retreated deeper into Russia. A brief attempt at resistance was made at Smolensk in August; the Russians were defeated in a series of battles, and Napoleon resumed his advance. The Russians again avoided battle, although in a few cases this was only achieved because Napoleon uncharacteristically hesitated to attack when the opportunity arose. Owing to the Russian army's scorched earth tactics, the French found it increasingly difficult to forage food for themselves and their horses.

The Russians eventually offered battle outside Moscow on 7 September: the Battle of Borodino resulted in approximately 44,000 Russian and 35,000 French dead, wounded or captured, and may have been the bloodiest day of battle in history up to that point in time. Although the French had won, the Russian army had accepted, and withstood, the major battle Napoleon had hoped would be decisive. Napoleon's own account was: "The most terrible of all my battles was the one before Moscow. The French showed themselves to be worthy of victory, but the Russians showed themselves worthy of being invincible."

The Russian army withdrew and retreated past Moscow. Napoleon entered the city, assuming its fall would end the war and Alexander would negotiate peace. However, on orders of the city's governor Feodor Rostopchin, rather than capitulation, Moscow was burned. After a month, concerned about loss of control back in France, Napoleon and his army left.

The French suffered greatly in the course of a ruinous retreat, including from the harshness of the Russian Winter. The Armée had begun as over 400,000 frontline troops, but in the end fewer than 40,000 crossed the Berezina River in November 1812. The Russians had lost 150,000 in battle and hundreds of thousands of civilians.

War of the Sixth Coalition

There was a lull in fighting over the winter of 1812–13 while both the Russians and the French rebuilt their forces; Napoleon was then able to field 350,000 troops. Heartened by France's loss in Russia, Prussia joined with Austria, Sweden, Russia, Great Britain, Spain, and Portugal in a new coalition. Napoleon assumed command in Germany and inflicted a series of defeats on the Coalition culminating in the Battle of Dresden in August 1813. Despite these successes, the numbers continued to mount against Napoleon, and the French army was pinned down by a force twice its size and lost at the Battle of Leipzig. This was by far the largest battle of the Napoleonic Wars and cost more than 90,000 casualties in total.

Napoleon withdrew back into France, his army reduced to 70,000 soldiers and 40,000 stragglers, against more than three times as many Allied troops. The French were surrounded: British armies pressed from the south, and other Coalition forces positioned to attack from the German states. Napoleon won a series of victories in the Six Days' Campaign, though these were not significant enough to turn the tide; Paris was captured by the Coalition in March 1814.

When Napoleon proposed the army march on the capital, his marshals decided to mutiny. On 4 April, led by Ney, they confronted Napoleon. Napoleon asserted the army would follow him, and Ney replied the army would follow its generals. Napoleon had no choice but to abdicate. He did so in favour of his son; however, the Allies refused to accept this, and Napoleon was forced to abdicate unconditionally on 11 April.

Exile in Elba

}} In the Treaty of Fontainebleau, the victors exiled him to Elba, an island of 12,000 inhabitants in the Mediterranean, 20 km off the Tuscan coast. They gave him sovereignty over the island and allowed him to retain his title of emperor. Napoleon attempted suicide with a pill he had carried since a near-capture by Russians on the retreat from Moscow. Its potency had weakened with age, and he survived to be exiled while his wife and son took refuge in Austria. In the first few months on Elba he created a small navy and army, developed the iron mines, and issued decrees on modern agricultural methods.

Hundred Days

Separated from his wife and son, who had come under Austrian control, cut off from the allowance guaranteed to him by the Treaty of Fontainebleau, and aware of rumours he was about to be banished to a remote island in the Atlantic Ocean, Napoleon escaped from Elba on 26 February 1815. He landed at Golfe-Juan on the French mainland, two days later. The 5th Regiment was sent to intercept him and made contact just south of Grenoble on 7 March 1815. Napoleon approached the regiment alone, dismounted his horse and, when he was within gunshot range, shouted, "Here I am. Kill your Emperor, if you wish." The soldiers responded with, "Vive L'Empereur!" and marched with Napoleon to Paris; Louis XVIII fled. On 13 March, the powers at the Congress of Vienna declared Napoleon an outlaw, and four days later Great Britain, Russia, Austria and Prussia bound themselves to each put 150,000 men into the field to end his rule. Napoleon arrived in Paris on 20 March and governed for a period now called the Hundred Days. By the start of June the armed forces available to him had reached 200,000, and he decided to go on the offensive to attempt to drive a wedge between the oncoming British and Prussian armies. The French Army of the North crossed the frontier into the United Kingdom of the Netherlands, in modern-day Belgium.

Napoleon's forces fought the allies, led by Wellington and Gebhard Leberecht von Blücher, at the Battle of Waterloo on 18 June 1815. Wellington's army withstood repeated attacks by the French and drove them from the field while the Prussians arrived in force and broke through Napoleon's right flank. Napoleon was defeated because he had to fight two armies with one, attacking an army in an excellent defensive position through wet and muddy terrain. His health that day may have affected his presence and vigour on the field, added to the fact that his subordinates may have let him down. Despite this, Napoleon came very close to clinching victory. Outnumbered, the French army left the battlefield in disorder, which allowed Coalition forces to enter France and restore Louis XVIII to the French throne.

Off the port of Rochefort, Charente-Maritime, after consideration of an escape to the United States, Napoleon formally demanded political asylum from the British Captain Frederick Maitland on on 15 July 1815.

Exile on Saint Helena

Napoleon was imprisoned and then exiled to the island of Saint Helena in the Atlantic Ocean, 1,870 km from the west coast of Africa. In his first two months there, he lived in a pavilion on the ''Briars'' estate, which belonged to a William Balcombe. Napoleon became friendly with his family, especially his younger daughter Lucia Elizabeth who later wrote ''Recollections of the Emperor Napoleon''. This friendship ended in 1818 when British authorities became suspicious that Balcombe had acted as an intermediary between Napoleon and Paris and dismissed him from the island.

Napoleon moved to Longwood House in December 1815; it had fallen into disrepair, and the location was damp, windswept and unhealthy. ''The Times'' published articles insinuating the British government was trying to hasten his death, and he often complained of the living conditions in letters to the governor and his custodian, Hudson Lowe. With a small cadre of followers, Napoleon dictated his memoirs and criticised his captors—particularly Lowe. Lowe's treatment of Napoleon is regarded as poor by historians such as Frank McLynn. Lowe exacerbated a difficult situation through measures including a reduction in Napoleon's expenditure, a rule that no gifts could be delivered to him if they mentioned his imperial status, and a document his supporters had to sign that guaranteed they would stay with the prisoner indefinitely.

In 1818, ''The Times'' reported a false rumour of Napoleon's escape and said the news had been greeted by spontaneous illuminations in London. There was sympathy for him in the British Parliament: Lord Holland gave a speech which demanded the prisoner be treated with no unnecessary harshness. Napoleon kept himself informed of the events through ''The Times'' and hoped for release in the event that Holland became prime minister. He also enjoyed the support of Lord Cochrane, who was involved in Chile's and Brazil's struggle for independence and wanted to rescue Napoleon and help him set up a new empire in South America, a scheme frustrated by Napoleon's death in 1821. There were other plots to rescue Napoleon from captivity including one from Texas, where exiled soldiers from the ''Grande Armée'' wanted a resurrection of the Napoleonic Empire in America. There was even a plan to rescue him with a primitive submarine. For Lord Byron, Napoleon was the epitome of the Romantic hero, the persecuted, lonely and flawed genius. The news that Napoleon had taken up gardening at Longwood also appealed to more domestic British sensibilities.

Death

In February 1821, his health began to fail rapidly, and on 3 May two British physicians, who had recently arrived, attended on him but could only recommend palliatives. He died two days later, after confession, Extreme Unction and Viaticum in the presence of Father Ange Vignali. His last words were, "France, armée, tête d'armée, Joséphine."("France, army, head of the army, Joséphine.") Napoleon's original death mask was created around 6 May, though it is not clear which doctor created it. In his will, he had asked to be buried on the banks of the Seine, but the British governor said he should be buried on St. Helena, in the Valley of the Willows. Hudson Lowe insisted the inscription should read 'Napoleon Bonaparte'; Montholon and Bertrand wanted the Imperial title 'Napoleon' as royalty were signed by their first names only. As a result the tomb was left nameless.

In 1840, Louis Philippe I obtained permission from the British to return Napoleon's remains to France. The remains were transported aboard the frigate ''Belle-Poule'', which had been painted black for the occasion, and on 29 November she arrived in Cherbourg. The remains were transferred to the steamship ''Normandie'', which transported them to Le Havre, up the Seine to Rouen and on to Paris. On 15 December, a state funeral was held. The hearse proceeded from the Arc de Triomphe down the Champs-Élysées, across the Place de la Concorde to the ''Esplanade des Invalides'' and then to the cupola in St Jérôme's Chapel, where it stayed until the tomb designed by Louis Visconti was completed. In 1861, Napoleon's remains were entombed in a porphyry sarcophagus in the crypt under the dome at Les Invalides.

Cause of death

Napoleon's physician, François Carlo Antommarchi, led the autopsy, which found the cause of death to be stomach cancer. Antommarchi did not, however, sign the official report. Napoleon's father had died of stomach cancer though this was seemingly unknown at the time of the autopsy. Antommarchi found evidence of a stomach ulcer, and it was the most convenient explanation for the British who wanted to avoid criticism over their care of the emperor. In 1955, the diaries of Napoleon's valet, Louis Marchand, appeared in print. His description of Napoleon in the months before his death led Sten Forshufvud to put forward other causes for his death, including deliberate arsenic poisoning, in a 1961 paper in ''Nature''. Arsenic was used as a poison during the era because it was undetectable when administered over a long period. Forshufvud, in a 1978 book with Ben Weider, noted the emperor's body was found to be remarkably well-preserved when moved in 1840. Arsenic is a strong preservative, and therefore this supported the poisoning hypothesis. Forshufvud and Weider observed that Napoleon had attempted to quench abnormal thirst by drinking high levels of orgeat syrup that contained cyanide compounds in the almonds used for flavouring. They maintained that the potassium tartrate used in his treatment prevented his stomach from expellation of these compounds and that the thirst was a symptom of poisoning. Their hypothesis was that the calomel given to Napoleon became an overdose, which killed him and left behind extensive tissue damage. A 2007 article stated the type of arsenic found in Napoleon's hair shafts was mineral type, the most toxic, and according to toxicologist Patrick Kintz, this supported the conclusion his death was murder.

The wallpaper used in Longwood contained a high level of arsenic compound used for colouring by British manufacturers. The adhesive, which in the cooler British environment was innocuous, may have grown mould in the more humid climate and emitted the poisonous gas arsine. This theory has been ruled out as it does not explain the arsenic absorption patterns found in other analyses.

There have been modern studies which have supported the original autopsy finding. Researchers, in a 2008 study, analysed samples of Napoleon's hair from throughout his life, and from his family and other contemporaries. All samples had high levels of arsenic, approximately 100 times higher than the current average. According to these researchers, Napoleon's body was already heavily contaminated with arsenic as a boy, and the high arsenic concentration in his hair was not caused by intentional poisoning; people were constantly exposed to arsenic from glues and dyes throughout their lives. 2007 and 2008 studies dismissed evidence of arsenic poisoning, and confirmed evidence of peptic ulcer and gastric cancer as the cause of death.

Marriages and children

Napoleon married Joséphine de Beauharnais in 1796, when he was twenty-six; she was a thirty-two-year-old widow whose first husband had been executed during the Revolution. Until she met Bonaparte, she had been known as 'Rose', a name which he disliked. He called her 'Joséphine' instead, and she went by this name henceforth. Bonaparte often sent her love letters while on his campaigns. He formally adopted her son Eugène and cousin Stéphanie and arranged dynastic marriages for them. Joséphine had her daughter Hortense marry Napoleon's brother Louis.

Joséphine had lovers, including a Hussar lieutenant, Hippolyte Charles, during Napoleon's Italian campaign. Napoleon learnt the full extent of her affair with Charles while in Egypt, and a letter he wrote to his brother Joseph regarding the subject was intercepted by the British. The letter appeared in the London and Paris presses, much to Napoleon's embarrassment. Napoleon had his own affairs too: during the Egyptian campaign he took Pauline Bellisle Foures, the wife of a junior officer, as his mistress. She became known as ''Cleopatra'' after the Ancient Egyptian ruler.

While Napoleon's mistresses had children by him, Joséphine did not produce an heir, possibly because of either the stresses of her imprisonment during the Reign of Terror or an abortion she may have had in her twenties. Napoleon ultimately chose divorce so he could remarry in search of an heir. In March 1810, he married Marie Louise, Archduchess of Austria, and a great niece of Marie Antoinette by proxy; thus he had married into a German royal and imperial family. They remained married until his death, though she did not join him in exile on Elba and thereafter never saw her husband again. The couple had one child, Napoleon Francis Joseph Charles (1811–1832), known from birth as the King of Rome. He became Napoleon II in 1814 and reigned for only two weeks. He was awarded the title of the Duke of Reichstadt in 1818 and died of tuberculosis aged 21, with no children.

Napoleon acknowledged two illegitimate children: Charles Léon (1806–1881) by Eléonore Denuelle de La Plaigne, and Count Alexandre Joseph Colonna-Walewski (1810–1868) by Countess Marie Walewska. He may have had further unacknowledged illegitimate offspring as well, such as Karl Eugin von Mühlfeld by Victoria Kraus; Hélène Napoleone Bonaparte (1816–1910) by Albine de Montholon; and Jules Barthélemy-Saint-Hilaire, whose mother remains unknown.

Napoleon and religions

Napoleon's baptism was held in Ajaccio on 21 July 1771; he was piously raised and received a Christian education; however, his teachers failed to give faith to the young boy. As an adult, Napoleon was described as a "deist with involuntary respect and fondness for Catholicism." He never believed in a living God; Napoleon's deity was an absent and distant God, but he pragmatically considered organised religions as key elements of social order, and especially Catholicism, whose "splendorous ceremonies and sublime moral" better act over the imagination of the people than other religions Napoleon had a civil marriage with Joséphine de Beauharnais, without religious ceremony, on 9 March 1796. During the campaign in Egypt, Napoleon showed much tolerance towards religion for a revolutionary general, holding discussions with muslim scholars and ordering religious celebrations, but General Dupuy, who accompanied Napoleon, revealed the political reasons for such behaviour: "We are fooling Egyptians with our pretended interest for their religion; neither Bonaparte nor we believe in this religion more than we did in Pius the Defunct's one". Napoleon crowned himself Emperor Napoleon I on 2 December 1804 at Notre Dame de Paris with the benediction of Pope Pius VII. The 1 April 1810, Napoleon religiously married the Austrian princess Marie Louise. In a private discussion with general Gourgaud during his exile on Saint Helena, Napoleon expressed materialistic views on the origin of man, and doubted the divinity of Jesus, stating that it is absurd to believe that Socrates, Plato, Muhammad and the Anglicans should be damned for not being Roman Catholics. However, Napoleon was anointed by a priest before his death.

Image

Napoleon has become a worldwide cultural icon who symbolises military genius and political power. Since his death, many towns, streets, ships, and even cartoon characters have been named after him. He has been portrayed in hundreds of films and discussed in hundreds of thousands of books and articles.

During the Napoleonic Wars he was taken seriously by the British press as a dangerous tyrant, poised to invade. A nursery rhyme warned children that Bonaparte ravenously ate naughty people; the 'bogeyman'. The British Tory press sometimes depicted Napoleon as much smaller than average height, and this image persists. Confusion about his height also results from the difference between the French pouce and British inch—2.71 and 2.54 cm respectively; he was about tall, average height for the period.

In 1908 psychologist Alfred Adler cited Napoleon to describe an inferiority complex in which short people adopt an over-aggressive behaviour to compensate for lack of height; this inspired the term ''Napoleon complex''. The stock character of Napoleon is a comically short "petty tyrant" and this has become a cliché in popular culture. He is often portrayed wearing a large bicorne hat with a hand-in-waistcoat gesture—a reference to the 1812 painting by Jacques-Louis David.

Legacy

Warfare

In the field of military organisation, Napoleon borrowed from previous theorists such as Jacques Antoine Hippolyte, Comte de Guibert, and from the reforms of preceding French governments, and then developed much of what was already in place. He continued the policy, which emerged from the Revolution, of promotion based primarily on merit. Corps replaced divisions as the largest army units, mobile artillery was integrated into reserve batteries, the staff system became more fluid and cavalry returned as an important formation in French military doctrine. These methods are now referred to as essential features of Napoleonic warfare. Though he consolidated the practice of modern conscription introduced by the Directory, one of the restored monarchy's first acts was to end it.

Weapons and other kinds of military technology remained largely static through the Revolutionary and Napoleonic eras, but 18th century operational mobility underwent significant change. Napoleon's biggest influence was in the conduct of warfare. Napoleon was regarded by the influential military theorist Carl von Clausewitz as a genius in the operational art of war, and historians rank him as a great military commander. Wellington, when asked who was the greatest general of the day, answered: "In this age, in past ages, in any age, Napoleon."

Napoleon suffered various military setbacks however: Aspern-Essling in 1809, Russia in 1812 and at Leipzig in 1813. He also had to abandon his forces in Egypt — the result of strategic defeat rather than any reverse in pitched battle. With the exception of two small scale battles in Italy, Napoleon was not defeated in a field battle without being heavily outnumbered.

Under Napoleon, a new emphasis towards the destruction, not just outmanoeuvring, of enemy armies emerged. Invasions of enemy territory occurred over broader fronts which made wars costlier and more decisive. The political impact of war increased significantly; defeat for a European power meant more than the loss of isolated enclaves. Near-Carthaginian peaces intertwined whole national efforts, intensifying the Revolutionary phenomenon of total war.

Bonapartism

In French political history, Bonapartism has two meanings. The term can refer to people who restored the French Empire under the House of Bonaparte including Napoleon's Corsican family and his nephew Louis. Napoleon left a Bonapartist dynasty which ruled France again; Louis became Napoleon III, Emperor of the Second French Empire and was the first President of France. In a wider sense, Bonapartism refers to a broad centrist or center-right political movement that advocates the idea of a strong and centralised state, based on populism.

Criticism

thumb|alt=Cartoon with many men fleeing over upturned tables as Bonaparte stands raising his hand towards them and his soldiers advance with bayonets|"''EXIT LIBERTÈ a la FRANCOIS ! or BUONAPARTE closing the Farce of Egalitè, at St. Cloud near Paris Nov. 10th. 1799''", British satirical depiction of the [[18 Brumaire|18 Brumaire coup d'état, by James Gillray.]] Napoleon ended lawlessness and disorder in post-Revolutionary France. He was, however, considered a tyrant and usurper by his opponents.

His critics charge that he was not significantly troubled when faced with the prospect of war and death for thousands, turned his search for undisputed rule into a series of conflicts throughout Europe and ignored treaties and conventions alike. His role in the Haitian Revolution and decision to reinstate slavery in France's oversea colonies are controversial and have an impact on his reputation. Napoleon institutionalised plunder of conquered territories: French museums contain art stolen by Napoleon's forces from across Europe. Artefacts were brought to the Musée du Louvre for a grand central museum; his example would later serve as inspiration for more notorious imitators. He was compared to Adolf Hitler most famously by the historian Pieter Geyl in 1947. David G. Chandler, historian of Napoleonic warfare, wrote that, "Nothing could be more degrading to the former and more flattering to the latter."

Critics argue Napoleon's true legacy must reflect the loss of status for France and needless deaths brought by his rule: historian Victor Davis Hanson writes, "After all, the military record is unquestioned—17 years of wars, perhaps six million Europeans dead, France bankrupt, her overseas colonies lost." McLynn notes that, "He can be viewed as the man who set back European economic life for a generation by the dislocating impact of his wars. However, Vincent Cronin replies that such criticism relies on the flawed premise that Napoleon was responsible for the wars which bear his name, when in fact France was the victim of a series of coalitions which aimed to destroy the ideals of the Revolution.

International Napoleonic Congresses are held regularly and include participation by members of the French and American military, French politicians and scholars from different countries.

Titles, styles, honours and arms

type	Monarchical
name	Napoléon I,Emperor of the French
reference	His Imperial Majesty
spoken	Your Imperial Majesty
alternative	My Lord }}

type	Monarchical
name	Napoleone I of Italy
reference	His Royal Majesty
spoken	Your Royal Majesty
alternative	My Lord }}

Titles and styles

18 May 1804 – 11 April 1814: ''His Imperial Majesty'' the Emperor of the French

17 March 1805 – 11 April 1814: ''His Imperial and Royal Majesty'' the Emperor of the French, King of Italy

20 March 1815 – 22 June 1815: ''His Imperial Majesty'' the Emperor of the French

Full titles

1804–1805

His Imperial Majesty Napoleon the First, By the Grace of God and the Constitutions of the Republic, Emperor of the French.

1805–1806

His Imperial and Royal Majesty Napoleon the First, By the Grace of God and the Constitutions of the Republic, Emperor of the French, King of Italy.

1806–1809

His Imperial and Royal Majesty Napoleon the First, By the Grace of God and the Constitutions of the Republic, Emperor of the French, King of Italy, Protector of the Confederation of the Rhine.

1809–1814

His Imperial and Royal Majesty Napoleon the First, By the Grace of God and the Constitutions of the Republic, Emperor of the French, King of Italy, Protector of the Confederation of the Rhine, Mediator of the Helvetic Confederation.

1815

His Imperial Majesty Napoleon the First, By the Grace of God and the Constitutions of the Republic, Emperor of the French.

Ancestry

{{ahnentafel-compact5 |style=font-size: 90%; line-height: 110% |border=1 |boxstyle=padding-top: 0; padding-bottom: 0; |boxstyle_1=background-color: #fcc; |boxstyle_2=background-color: #fb9; |boxstyle_3=background-color: #ffc; |boxstyle_4=background-color: #bfc; |boxstyle_5=background-color: #9fe; |1= 1. Napoleon I, Emperor of the French and King of Italy (1769–1821) |2= 2. Carlo Maria Buonaparte (1746–1785) |3= 3. Maria Letizia Ramolino (1750–1836) |4= 4. Giuseppe Maria Buonaparte (1713–1763) |5= 5. Maria Saveria Paravisini (1715–bef. 1750) |6= 6. Giovanni Geronimo Ramolino (1723–1755) |7= 7. Angela Maria Pietrasanta (1725–1790) |8= 8. Sebastiano Nicola Buonaparte (1683–1720/60) |9= 9. Maria Anna Tusoli (1690–1760) |10= 10. Giuseppe Maria Paravisini |11= 11. Maria Angela Salineri |12= 12. Giovanni Agostino Ramolino |13= 13. Angela Maria Peri |14= 14. Giuseppe Maria Pietrasanta |15= 15. Maria Josephine Malerba |16= 16. Giuseppe Maria Buonaparte (1663–1703) |17= 17. Maria Colonna Bozzi (1668–1704) |18= 18. Carlo Tusoli |19= 19. Isabella |20= |21= |22= 22. Angelo Agostino Salineri |23= 23. Francetta Merezano |24= 24. Giovanni Girolamo Ramolino (1645–?) |25= 25. Maria Laetitia Boggiano |26= 26. Andrea Peri (1669–?) |27= 27. Maria Maddalena Colonna d'Istria |28= 28. Giovanni Antonio Pietrasanta |29= |30= |31= }}

Titles

Notes

Citations

References

External links

The Napoleonic Guide

Napoleon Series

International Napoleonic Society

Napoleon 101, podcast by J. David Markham

Napoleon Bonaparte and Chess Edward Winter (chess historian)

Biography by the US Public Broadcasting Service

Biography on the Napoleon Bonaparte Wikia

Vol. 1/4 Vol. 3/4 Category:1769 births Category:1821 deaths Category:18th-century rulers in Europe Category:19th-century monarchs in Europe Category:Attempted assassination survivors Category:Culture heroes Category:Deaths from stomach cancer Category:First French Empire Category:French commanders of the Napoleonic Wars Category:French emperors Category:French exiles Category:French military leaders of the French Revolutionary Wars Category:French military personnel of the French Revolutionary Wars Category:French people of Italian descent Category:French Roman Catholics Category:House of Bonaparte Category:Italian monarchs Category:Kings of Italy Category:Leaders who took power by coup Category:Members of the French Academy of Sciences Category:Monarchs who abdicated Category:People excommunicated by the Roman Catholic Church Category:People from Ajaccio Category:Presidents of Italy Category:Princes of Andorra

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Consort	yes
name	Joséphine de Beauharnais
succession	Empress consort of the French
succession	Empress consort of the French
reign	18 May 1804 – 10 January 1810
coronation	2 December 1804
succession1	Queen consort of Italy
reign1	26 May 1805 – 10 January 1810
spouse	Alexandre de BeauharnaisNapoleon I
issue	Eugène de BeauharnaisHortense de Beauharnais
house	Tascher de la PagerieHouse of BeauharnaisHouse of Bonaparte
full name	Marie Josèphe Rose Tascher de La Pagerie
father	Joseph Gaspard Tascher de La Pagerie
mother	Rose Claire des Vergers de Sannois
birth date	June 23, 1763
birth place	Les Trois-Îlets, Martinique
death date	May 29, 1814
death place	Rueil-Malmaison, Île-de-France, France
Religion	Roman Catholic

Joséphine de Beauharnais (; 23 June 1763 – 29 May 1814) was the first wife of Napoléon Bonaparte, and thus the first Empress of the French. Her first husband Alexandre de Beauharnais had been guillotined during the Reign of Terror, and she had been imprisoned in the Carmes prison until her release five days after Alexandre's execution.

Through her daughter, Hortense, she was the maternal grandmother of Napoléon III. Through her son, Eugène, she was the great-grandmother of later Swedish and Danish kings and queens, as well as the last Queen of Greece. The current reigning houses of Belgium, Norway and Luxembourg also descend from her.

She did not bear Napoleon any children; as a result, he divorced her in 1810 to marry Marie Louise of Austria.

Joséphine was the recipient of numerous love letters written by Napoleon, many of which still exist. Her chateau of Malmaison was noted for its magnificent rose garden, over which she supervised closely, due to her passionate interest in roses that she collected from all over the world.

Early life

Marie Josèphe Rose Tascher de La Pagerie was born in Les Trois-Îlets, Martinique to a wealthy white Creole family that owned a sugar plantation. She was a daughter of Joseph-Gaspard Tascher (1735–1790), chevalier, Seigneur de la Pagerie, lieutenant of ''Troupes de Marine'', and his wife, the former Rose-Claire des Vergers de Sannois (1736–1807), whose maternal grandfather, Anthony Brown, was Irish.

The family struggled financially after hurricanes destroyed their estate in 1766. Edmée (Desireé for the french), Joséphine's paternal aunt, had been the mistress of François, Vicomte de Beauharnais, a French aristocrat. When François's health began to fail, Edmée arranged the advantageous marriage of her niece, Catherine-Désirée, to François's son Alexandre. This marriage would be highly beneficial for the Tascher family, because it would keep the Beauharnais money in their hands; however, twelve-year old Catherine died on 16 October 1777, before leaving Martinique for France. In service to their aunt Edmée's goals, Catherine was replaced by her older sister, Joséphine.

In October 1779, Joséphine went to France with her father. She married Alexandre on 13 December 1779, in Noisy-le-Grand. Although their marriage was not happy, they had two children: a son, Eugène de Beauharnais (1781–1824), and a daughter, Hortense de Beauharnais (1783–1837), who married Napoléon's brother Louis Bonaparte in 1802.

On 2 March 1794, during the Reign of Terror, the ''Comité de Salut public'' ordered the arrest of her husband. He was jailed in the Carmes prison in Paris. Considering Joséphine as too close to the counter-revolutionary financial circles, the Committee ordered her arrest on 19 April 1794. A warrant of arrest was issued against her on 2 Floréal, year II (21 April 1794), and she was imprisoned in the Carmes prison until 10 Thermidor, year II (28 July 1794). Her husband was accused of having poorly defended Mainz in July 1793, and considered an aristocratic "suspect", was sentenced to death and guillotined, with his cousin Augustin, on 23 July 1794, on the ''Place de la Révolution'' (today's Place de la Concorde) in Paris. Joséphine was freed five days later, thanks to the fall and execution of Robespierre, which ended the Reign of Terror. On 27 July 1794 (9 Thermidor), Tallien arranged the liberation of Thérèse Cabarrus, and soon after that of Joséphine.

In June 1795, a new law allowed her to recover the possessions of Alexandre.

Meeting Napoleon

Joséphine de Beauharnais, now a widow, became the mistress of several leading political figures, including Paul François Jean Nicolas Barras. In 1795, she met General Napoléon Bonaparte, six years her junior, and became his mistress. In a letter to her in December, he wrote, "I awake full of you. Your image and the memory of last night’s intoxicating pleasures has left no rest to my senses." Joséphine was a renowned spendthrift and Barras may have encouraged the relationship with ''Général Bonaparte'' in order to get her off his hands.

Joséphine was described as being of average height, svelte, shapely, with silky, chestnut-brown hair, hazel eyes, and a rather sallow complexion. Her nose was small and straight, and her mouth was well-formed; however she kept it closed most of the time so as not to reveal her bad teeth. She was praised for her elegance, style, and low, "silvery", beautifully-modulated voice.

In January 1796, Napoléon Bonaparte proposed to her and they married on 9 March. Until meeting Bonaparte, she was known as ''Rose'', but Bonaparte preferred to call her ''Joséphine'', the name she adopted from then on. Two days after the wedding, Bonaparte left to lead the French army in Italy, and during their separation, sent her many love letters. In February 1797, he wrote: “You to whom nature has given spirit, sweetness, and beauty, you who alone can move and rule my heart, you who know all too well the absolute empire you exercise over it!” Many of his letters are still intact today, while very few of hers have been found; it is not known whether this is due to their having been lost or to their initial scarcity.

In the meantime, Joséphine, left behind in Paris, began an affair in 1796 with a handsome Hussar lieutenant, Hippolyte Charles. The rumours that reached Bonaparte so infuriated him that his love for her changed entirely.

During the Egyptian campaign of 1798, Napoléon Bonaparte started an affair of his own with Pauline Bellisle Foures, the wife of a junior officer who became known as "Napoleon's Cleopatra." The relationship between Joséphine and Napoléon was never the same after this. His letters became less loving. No subsequent lovers of Joséphine are recorded, but Napoléon continued to have sexual affairs with other women. In 1804, he said, "Power is my mistress."

An Empress

Shortly before their coronation, there was an incident at the Château de Saint-Cloud that nearly sundered the marriage between the two. Joséphine caught Napoléon in the bedroom of her lady-in-waiting, Elisabeth de Vaudey, and Napoléon threatened to divorce her as she had not produced an heir. Eventually, however, through the efforts of her daughter Hortense, the two were reconciled.

The coronation ceremony, officiated by Pope Pius VII, took place at Notre Dame de Paris, on 2 December 1804. Following a pre-arranged protocol, Napoléon first crowned himself, then put the crown on Joséphine's head, proclaiming her empress.

When, after a few years, it became clear she could not have a child, Joséphine agreed to a divorce so the Emperor could remarry in the hope of having an heir. The divorce took place on 10 January 1810. On 11 March, Napoléon married Marie-Louise of Austria by proxy; the formal ceremony took place at the Louvre on 1 April. Napoléon once remarked after marrying Marie-Louise that "he had married a womb."

Later life and death

After the divorce, Joséphine lived at the Château de Malmaison, near Paris. She remained on good terms with Napoléon, who once said that the only thing to come between them was her debts.

Joséphine died of pneumonia in Rueil-Malmaison, four days after catching cold during a walk with Tsar Alexander in the gardens of Malmaison. She was buried in the nearby church of Saint Pierre-Saint Paul in Rueil. Her daughter Hortense is interred near her.

Napoléon claimed to a friend, while in exile on Saint Helena, that "I truly loved my Joséphine, but I did not respect her." Despite his numerous affairs, eventual divorce, and remarriage, the Emperor's last words on his death bed at St. Helena were: "France, the Army, the Head of the Army, Joséphine."

Descendants

Hortense's son became Napoléon III, Emperor of the French. Eugène's daughter Joséphine, married King Oscar I of Sweden, the son of Napoléon's one-time fiancée, Désirée Clary. Through her, Joséphine is a direct ancestor of the present heads of the royal houses of Belgium, Denmark, Greece, Luxembourg, Norway and Sweden. Another of Eugène's daughters, Amélie de Beauharnais von Leuchtenberg, married Emperor Pedro I of Brazil (also former king Pedro IV of Portugal) in Rio de Janeiro, and became Empress of Brazil, but they did not have issue.

Patroness of roses

In 1799 while Napoleon was in Egypt, Josephine purchased the Chateau de Malmaison. She had it landscaped in an “English” style, hiring landscapers and horticulturalists from the United Kingdom. These included: Thomas Blaikie, a Scottish horticultural expert, another Scottish gardener, Alexander Howatson, the botanist, Ventenat, and the horticulturist, Andre Dupont. The rose garden was begun soon after purchase; inspired by Dupont’s love of roses. Josephine took a personal interest in the gardens and the roses, and learned a great deal about botany and horticulture from her staff. Josephine wanted to collect all known roses so Napoleon ordered his warship commanders to search all seized vessels for plants to be forwarded to Malmaison. Pierre-Joseph Redoute was commissioned by her to paint the flowers from her gardens. Les Roses was published 1817-20 with 168 plates of roses, 75-80 of which grew at Malmaison. The English nurseryman Kennedy was a major supplier, despite England and France being at war, his shipments were allowed to cross blockades. Specifically, when Hume’s Blush Tea-Scented China was imported to England from China, the British and French Admiralties made arrangements in 1810 for specimens to cross naval blockades for Josephine’s garden. Sir John Banks, Director of the Royal Botanical Gardens, Kew, also sent her roses. The general assumption is that she had about 250 roses in her garden when she died in 1814. Unfortunately the roses were not catalogued during her tenure. There may have only been 197 rose varieties in existence in 1814, according to calculations by Jules Gravereaux of Roseraie de l’Haye. There were 12 species, about 40 centifolias, mosses and damasks, 20 Bengals, and about 100 gallicas. The botanist Claude Antoine Thory, who wrote the descriptions for Redoute’s paintings in Les Roses, noted that Josephine’s Bengal rose R. indica had black spots on it. She produced the first written history of the cultivation of roses.

Modern hybridization of roses through artificial, controlled pollination began with Josephine’s horticulturalist Andre Dupont. Prior to this, most new rose cultivars were spontaneous mutations or accidental, bee-induced hybrids, and appeared rarely. With controlled pollination, the appearance of new cultivars grew exponentially. Of the roughly 200 types of roses known to Josephine, Dupont had created 25 while in her employ. Subsequent French hybridizers created over 1000 new rose cultivars in the 30 years following Josephine's death. In 1910, less than 100 years after her death, there were about 8000 rose types in Gravereaux's garden. Bechtel also feels that the popularity of roses as garden plants was boosted by Josephine’s patronage. She was a popular ruler and fashionable people copied her. Brenner and Scanniello call her the "Godmother of modern rosomaniacs" and attribute her with our modern style of vernacular cultivar names as opposed to latinized, pseudo-scientific cultivar names. For instance, ''R. alba incarnata'' became ‘Cuisse de Nymphe Emue’ in her garden. After Josephine’s death in 1814 the house was vacant at times, the garden and house ransacked and vandalised, and the garden’s remains were destroyed in a battle in 1870.

The rose ‘Souvenir de la Malmaison’ appeared in 1844, 30 years after her death, named in her honor by a Russian Grand Duke planting one of the first specimens in the Imperial Garden in St. Petersburg.

Titles held

The Viscountess of Beauharnais

''Her Imperial Majesty'' The Empress of the French

''Her Imperial Highness'' Empress Joséphine, Duchess of Navarre

Ancestry

{{ahnentafel-compact5 |style=font-size: 90%; line-height: 110% |border=1 |boxstyle=padding-top: 0; padding-bottom: 0; |boxstyle_1=background-color: #fcc; |boxstyle_2=background-color: #fb9; |boxstyle_3=background-color: #ffc; |boxstyle_4=background-color: #bfc; |boxstyle_5=background-color: #9fe; | 1 = Marie Josèphe Rose Tascher de la Pagerie | 2 = Joseph-Gaspard Tascher de La Pagerie | 3 = Rose Claire des Vergers de Sannois | 4 = Gaspard Joseph Tascher de La Pagerie | 5 = Françoise Bourreau de La Chevalerie | 6 = Joseph François des Vergers de Sannois | 7 = Catherine Marie Brown | 8 = Gaspard de Tascher, Seigneur de La Pagerie | 9 = Edmée Henriette Madeleine du Plessis de Savonnières | 10= François Bourreau, Seigneur de La Chevalerie | 11= Marie Thérèse Jaham des Prés | 12= Joseph des Vergers de Sablons | 13= Élisabeth de Maigne du Plat | 14= Anthony Brown | 15= Catherine des Vergers de Sannois | 16= François de Tascher, Seigneur de La Pagerie | 17= Marie Pétronille Sophie d'Arnoul | 18= Henri du Plessis, Seigneur de Savonnières | 19= Agathe de Thienne | 20= Jacques Bourreau, Seigneur de La Guesserie | 21= Anne Hubert | 22= Jacques Jaham des Prés | 23= Adrienne Dyel de Graville | 24= Domique Florimund des Vergers de Sannois | 25= Anne-Catherine Taudier de Lafond, Dame de L'Espérance | 26= Guillaume de Maigne du Plat | 27= Marie d'Orange | 28= George Brown | 29= Gertrude Morley | 30= Dominique Florimund des Vergers de Sannois | 31= Anne-Catherine Taudier de Lafond, Dame de L'Espérance }}

Books

Josephine by André Castelot ISBN 4-87187-853-8

See also

Tuileries Palace

Aimée Dubuc de Rivery

Notre Dame de Paris

References

Bruce, Evangeline, ''Napoleon and Josephine: An Improbable Marriage'', NY: Scribner, 1995, ISBN 0025178105.

External links

Joséphine de Beauharnais (de Tascher de la Pagerie) (in French). Site published by the current members of the family Tascher de la Pagerie.

Château de Malmaison (in French), Joséphine's residence from 1799–1814, the site of her death.

This is an informative PBS site with a plethora of translated quotes and letters.

Further pictures of Joséphine:

''Memoirs of the Empress Josephine (Volume 1)'' at archive.org

''Memoirs of the Empress Josephine (Volume 2)'' at archive.org

Category:1763 births Category:1814 deaths Category:People from Martinique Category:Napoleon Category:House of Bonaparte Josephine de Beauharnais Category:Empresses of the French Category:Italian queens consort Category:People of the First French Empire Category:French nobility Category:French people of Irish descent Category:18th-century French people Category:19th-century French people

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Realm	japan
Honorific-prefix	His Imperial Majesty
Name	Akihito
Native name	明仁 今上天皇
Succession	''125th'' Emperor of Japan
Reign	7 January 1989 – present()
Coronation	12 November 1990
Cor-type	japan
Predecessor	Hirohito
Successor	Naruhito, Crown Prince of Japan
Suc-type	Heir apparent
Reg-type	Prime Ministers
Regent
Spouse	Empress Michiko
Issue	Naruhito, Prince HiroFumihito, Prince AyaSayako, Princess Nori
House	Imperial House of Japan
Royal anthem	''Kimi ga Yo''
Era	Heisei
Father	Emperor Hirohito
Mother	Empress Kōjun
Styles	''HIM'' The Emperor of Japan''HIH'' The Prince Tsugu
Birth date
Birth place	Tokyo, Empire of Japan
Occupation	Emperor, ichthyologist
Religion	Shinto

H.I.M. |明仁||born 23 December 1933}} is the , the 125th emperor of his line according to Japan's traditional order of succession. He acceded to the throne in 1989.

Name

In Japan, the emperor is never referred to by his given name, but rather is referred to as "His Imperial Majesty the Emperor" which may be shortened to . In writing, the emperor is also referred to formally as . The Era of Akihito's reign bears the name "Heisei" (), and according to custom he will be renamed "Emperor Heisei" (平成天皇 ''Heisei tennō''; see "posthumous name") by order of the cabinet after his death. At the same time, the name of the next era under his successor will also be established.

Biography

Akihito is the eldest son and the fifth child of Emperor Hirohito (the Showa Emperor) and Empress Kōjun. Titled as a child, he was raised and educated by his private tutors and then attended the elementary and secondary departments of the Peers' School (''Gakushuin'') from 1940 to 1952. Unlike his predecessors in the Imperial Family, he did not receive a commission as an Army officer, at the request of his father, Hirohito.

During the American firebombing raids on Tokyo in March 1945, he and his younger brother, HIH Prince Masahito, were evacuated from the city. During the American occupation of Japan following World War II, Prince Akihito was tutored in English and Western manners by Elizabeth Gray Vining. He briefly studied at the Department of Political Science at Gakushuin University in Tokyo, though he never received a degree. Although he was Heir-Apparent to the Chrysanthemum Throne from the moment of his birth, his formal was held at the Tokyo Imperial Palace on 10 November 1952. In June 1953, Crown Prince Akihito represented Japan at the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in London.

After the death of Emperor Hirohito on 7 January 1989, the crown prince received the succession (''senso''). Emperor Akihito formally acceded to the throne (''sokui'') on 12 November 1990.

Emperor Akihito underwent surgery for prostate cancer in January 2003. Since succeeding to the throne, Emperor Akihito has made an effort to bring the Imperial Family closer to the Japanese people. The Emperor and Empress of Japan have made official visits to eighteen countries, as well as all forty-seven Prefectures of Japan. urging his people not to give up hope and to help each other. The Emperor had never been featured in a prerecorded televised message before, and so this event is historic and showed the scale of this disaster. The Emperor and the Empress also made a visit on Wednesday, 30 March 2011 to a temporary shelter housing refugees of the disaster, in order to inspire hope in the people. This kind of event is also extremely rare, though in line with the Emperor's attempts to bring the Imperial Family closer to the people.

Marriage and children

On 10 April 1959, he married Michiko Shōda (born 24 October 1934), the eldest daughter of Hidesaburo Shōda, the president and later honorary chairman of Nisshin Flour Milling Company. The new Crown Princess was the first commoner to marry into the imperial family. The Emperor and the Empress have three children:

HIH The Crown Prince Naruhito (b. 23 February 1960, titled Hiro-no-miya or Prince Hiro),

HIH The Prince Akishino (Fumihito, b. 30 November 1965, titled Aya-no-miya or Prince Aya) and

Sayako Kuroda, formerly HIH The Princess Sayako (titled Nori-no-miya or Princess Nori, b. 18 April 1969).

Official functions

Despite being strictly constrained by his constitutional position, he also issued several wide-ranging statements of remorse to Asian countries, for their suffering under Japanese occupation, beginning with an expression of remorse to China made in April 1989, three months after the death of his father, Emperor Hirohito.

In June 2005, the Emperor visited the US territory of Saipan, the site of a battle in World War II from 15 June to 9 July 1944 (Battle of Saipan). Accompanied by Empress Michiko, he offered prayers and flowers at several memorials, honoring not only the Japanese who died, but also American soldiers, Korean laborers, and local islanders. It was the first trip by a Japanese monarch to a World War II battlefield abroad. The Saipan journey was received with high praise by the Japanese people, as were the Emperor's visits to war memorials in Tokyo, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and Okinawa in 1995.

On 6 September 2006, the Emperor celebrated the birth of his first grandson, Prince Hisahito, the third child of the Emperor's younger son. Prince Hisahito is the first male heir born to the Japanese imperial family in 41 years (since his father Prince Akishino) and could avert a possible succession crisis as the Emperor's elder son, the Crown Prince, has only one daughter, Princess Aiko. Under Japan's current male-only succession law, Princess Aiko is not eligible for the throne. The birth of Prince Hisahito could mean that proposed changes to the law to allow Aiko to ascend the Chrysanthemum Throne will not go through after being temporarily shelved following the announcement of Princess Kiko's third pregnancy in February 2006.

Ichthyological research

In extension of his father's interest in marine biology, the Emperor is a published ichthyological researcher, and has specialized studies within the taxonomy of the family ''Gobiidae''. He has written papers for scholarly journals, namely ''Gene'' and the ''Japanese Journal of Ichthyology''.

He has also written papers about the history of science during the Edo and Meiji eras, which were published in ''Science'' and ''Nature''. In 2005, a newly described goby was named ''Exyrias akihito'' in his honour.

Awards

National

Collar and Grand Cordon of the Supreme Order of the Chrysanthemum

Grand Cordon of The Order of the Rising Sun with the Paulownia Blossoms (renamed Grand Cordon of The Order of the Paulownia Flowers from 2003)

Grand Cordon of the Order of the Sacred Treasure

Order of Culture

The Golden Medal of Merit of the Japanese Red Cross

The Golden Medal of Honorary Member of the Japanese Red Cross

International

Country	Awards
	Order of the Supreme Sun
	Decoration for Services to the Republic of Austria Grand Star
	Order of al-Khalifa Collar
	Order of Leopold (Belgium)>Order of Leopold Grand Cordon
	Presidential Order
	Order of the Southern Cross Grand Collar
	Order of Valour Grand Cordon
	Order of the Merit of Chile Grand Collar
	Colombian_military_decorations#Order of Boyaca (Orden de Boyacá)>Order of the Cross of Boyaca Grand Collar
	Order of the Ivory Coast Grand Cordon
	Order of the White Lion 1st Class (Civil Division) with Collar Chain
	Order of the Elephant Knight Grand Cross
	Order of the Nile Grand Collar
	Order of the Cross of Terra Mariana The Collar of the Cross
	Order of Solomon Grand Collar
	Order of the White Rose Grand Cross with Collar
	Légion d'honneur Grand Cross
	Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany Grand Cross, Special Class
	Order of the Redeemer Grand Cross
	Order of Merit of Hungary Grand Cross
	Order of the Falcon Grand Cross with Collar
	Star of Adipurna 1st Class
	Order of Merit of the Republic Grand Cross with Cordon
	Order of Hussein ibn' Ali Collar
	Order of the Golden Eagle
	Order of the Golden Heart
	Order of Mubarak the Great Collar
	Order of the Three Stars Grand Cross with Collar
	Order of the Star of Africa Knight Grand BandOrder of the Pioneers of the Republic Knight Grand Band
	Order of Vytautas the Great the Great Grand Cross with Collar
	Order of the Gold Lion of the House of Nassau Knight
	Order of the Lion Grand Commander
	Darjah Utama Seri Mahkota Negara
	National Order Grand Cordon
	Order of the Aztec Eagle Grand Collar
	Order of Muhammad Grand Collar
	Order of Ojaswi Rajanya
	Order of the Netherlands Lion Knight Grand Cross
	Order of the Federal Republic Grand Cordon
	Order of St. Olav>Royal Norwegian Order of St. Olav Grand Cross with Collar
	Order of Oman Superior Class
	Nishan-e-Pakistan 1st Class
	Order of Manuel Amador Guerrero Gold Collar
	Order of the Sun (Peru)>Order of the Sun Grand Cross in Brilliants
	Philippine Legion of Honor Chief Commander
	Order of the White Eagle (Poland)>Order of the White Eagle
	Order of Prince Henry Grand Collar
	Collar of Independence
	Badr Chain
	Order of the Lion (Senegal)>Order of the Lion Grand Cordon
	Order of Good Hope Grand Cross in Gold
	Order of the Golden Fleece Knight
	Royal Order of the Seraphim Knight
	The Most Auspicious Order of the RajamitrabhornThe Most Illustrious Order of the Royal House of Chakri
	Order of the Republic of Gambia Grand Commander
	Order of Prince Yaroslav the Wise First Class
	Collar of the Federation
	Stranger 984th Knight of Order of the GarterKnight Grand Cross of the Royal Victorian OrderQueen Elizabeth II Coronation Medal
	Order of the Yugoslav Star
	Order of the Leopard Grand Cordon

Other Awards

The Royal Society King Charles II Medal

Ancestors

{{ahnentafel-compact5 |style=font-size: 90%; line-height: 110%; |border=1 |boxstyle=padding-top: 0; padding-bottom: 0; |boxstyle_1=background-color: #fcc; |boxstyle_2=background-color: #fb9; |boxstyle_3=background-color: #ffc; |boxstyle_4=background-color: #bfc; |boxstyle_5=background-color: #9fe; |1= 1. Akihito, 125th Emperor of Japan |2= 2. Hirohito, Emperor Shōwa |3= 3. Princess Nagako of Kuni |4= 4. Yoshihito, Emperor Taishō |5= 5. Princess Sadako Kugō |6= 6. Kuniyoshi, 2nd Imperial Prince Kuni |7= 7. Princess Chikako Shimazu |8= 8. Mutsuhito, Emperor Meiji |9= 9. Lady Naruko Yanagihara |10= 10. Prince Kujō Michitaka of the Fujiwara Clan |11= 11. Lady Ikuko Noma |12= 12. Asahiko, 1st Imperial Prince Kuni |13= 13. Lady Makiko Izumi |14= 14. Prince Shimazu Tadayoshi, 29th Daimyo of Satsuma, Osumi and Hyuga |15= 15. Lady Sumako Yamazaki |16= 16. Osahito, Emperor Kōmei |17= 17. Lady Yoshiko Nakayama |18= 18. Count Takamitsu Yanagihara |19= 19. Lady Utano Hasegawa |20= 20. Prince Kujō Hisatada, Regent of Japan |21= 21. Lady Tsuneko Karahashi |22= 22. Yorioki Noma |23= |24= 24. Prince Fushimi Kuniye, 20th and 23rd of the miyake of Fushimi |25= 25. Lady Nobuko Toriikōji |26= 26. Sir Toshimasu Izumitei, Custodian of Shimogamo Shrine |27= |28= 28. Prince Shimazu Hisamitsu, 1st Prince of Tamazato-Shimazu |29= 29. Lady Chimoko Shimazu of Echizen-Shimazu |30= |31= }}

Ancestry in Genealogics.org

Patrilineal descent

Akihito's patriline is the line from which he is descended father to son.

Patrilineal descent is the principle behind membership in royal houses, as it can be traced back through the generations, which means that Akihito is a member of the Imperial House of Japan.

;Imperial House of Japan

#Emperor Keitai, ca. 450–534 #Emperor Kimmei, 509–571 #Emperor Bidatsu, 538–585 #Prince Oshisaka, ca. 556–??? #Emperor Jomei, 593–641 #Emperor Tenji, 626–671 #Prince Shiki, ???–716 #Emperor Kōnin, 709–786 #Emperor Kammu, 737–806 #Emperor Saga, 786–842 #Emperor Ninmyō, 810–850 #Emperor Kōkō, 830–867 #Emperor Uda, 867–931 #Emperor Daigo, 885–930 #Emperor Murakami, 926–967 #Emperor En'yū, 959–991 #Emperor Ichijō, 980–1011 #Emperor Go-Suzaku, 1009–1045 #Emperor Go-Sanjō, 1034–1073 #Emperor Shirakawa, 1053–1129 #Emperor Horikawa, 1079–1107 #Emperor Toba, 1103–1156 #Emperor Go-Shirakawa, 1127–1192 #Emperor Takakura, 1161–1181 #Emperor Go-Toba, 1180–1239 #Emperor Tsuchimikado, 1196–1231 #Emperor Go-Saga, 1220–1272 #Emperor Go-Fukakusa, 1243–1304 #Emperor Fushimi, 1265–1317 #Emperor Go-Fushimi, 1288–1336 #Emperor Kōgon, 1313–1364 #Emperor Sukō, 1334–1398 #Prince Yoshihito Fushimi, 1351–1416 #Prince Sadafusa Fushimi, 1372–1456 #Emperor Go-Hanazono, 1419–1471 #Emperor Go-Tsuchimikado, 1442–1500 #Emperor Go-Kashiwabara, 1464–1526 #Emperor Go-Nara, 1495–1557 #Emperor Ōgimachi, 1517–1593 #Prince Masahito, 1552–1586 #Emperor Go-Yōzei, 1572–1617 #Emperor Go-Mizunoo, 1596–1680 #Emperor Reigen, 1654–1732 #Emperor Higashiyama, 1675–1710 #Prince Naohito Kanin, 1704–1753 #Prince Sukehito Kanin, 1733–1794 #Emperor Kōkaku, 1771–1840 #Emperor Ninkō, 1800–1846 #Emperor Kōmei, 1831–1867 #Emperor Meiji, 1852–1912 #Emperor Taishō, 1879–1926 #Emperor Hirohito, 1901–1989 #Emperor Akihito, b. 1933

See also

The Emperor's Birthday

Imperial Household Agency

Imperial Household of Japan

Japanese era name

List of Japanese Emperors

List of longest reigning current monarchs

References

External links

The Japanese Imperial Household Agency Homepage, press conferences, extensive biography, official duties and public activities.

Complete transcript and audio mp3 and video of 'Do Not Lose Hope' Address to the Nation at AmericanRhetoric.com

Category:1933 births Category:Living people Category:Japanese emperors Category:Reigning monarchs Category:Current national leaders Category:Japanese ichthyologists Category:Knights of the Elephant Category:Knights of the Golden Fleece Category:Extra Knights Companion of the Garter Category:Grand Cordons of the Order of Leopold (Belgium) Category:Recipients of the Order of the White Eagle (Poland) Category:Grand Croix of the Légion d'honneur Category:Recipients of the Order of the Nile Category:Gakushuin University alumni Category:Grand Crosses of the Order of the Redeemer Category:Recipients of the Order of the Chrysanthemum Category:Recipients of the Order of the Rising Sun Category:Recipients of the Order of the Sacred Treasure Category:Recipients of the Order of Culture Category:Recipients of the Order of the Supreme Sun Category:Grand Collars of the Order of the Southern Cross Category:Recipients of the Order of Merit (Chile) Category:Recipients of the Order of the White Lion Category:Recipients of the Order of Solomon Category:Commanders Grand Cross with Collar of the Order of the White Rose of Finland Category:Recipients of the Order of the Falcon Category:Knights Grand Cross with Collar of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic Category:Recipients of the Order of the Three Stars, 1st Class Category:Recipients of the Order of Vytautas the Great Category:Recipients of the Order of the Gold Lion of the House of Nassau Category:Recipients of the Order of the Aztec Eagle Category:Knights Grand Cross of the Order of the Netherlands Lion Category:Grand Crosses Special Class of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany Category:Knights Grand Cross with Collar of the Order of St. Olav Category:Recipients of the Nishan-e-Pakistan Category:Recipients of the Order of Manuel Amador Guerrero Category:Recipients of the Order of the Sun (Peru) Category:Recipients of the Philippine Legion of Honor Category:Grand Collars of the Order of Prince Henry Category:Recipients of the Order of the Seraphim Category:Honorary Knights Grand Cross of the Royal Victorian Order Category:Recipients of the Order of the Yugoslav Star Category:Knights of the Order of the Rajamitrabhorn Category:Knights of the Order of the Royal House of Chakri Category:Recipients of the Collar of the Order of the Cross of Terra Mariana Category:Collars of the Order of the White Lion Category:Recipients of the Order of Prince Yaroslav the Wise Category:Recipients of the Decoration for Services to the Republic of Austria Category:Collars of the Order of the Cross of Terra Mariana

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