BRAVE HEARTS- Napoleon Bonaparte

Napoleon Bonaparte, (15 August 1769 – 5 May 1821) later known as Napoleon I, was a French military and political leader who had a significant impact on the history of Europe. He was a general during the French Revolution, the ruler of France as First Consul of the French Republic and Emperor of the First French Empire. Napoleon was imprisoned and then exiled to the island of St. Helena in the Atlantic Ocean, 2,000 km from any major landmass.In the early years of exile Napoleon received visitors but, as the restrictions placed on him were increased, his life became that of a recluse.Napoleon married Joséphine in 1796, when he was 26; she was a 32-year old widow whose first husband had been executed during the revolution. Until she met Bonaparte, she had always been Rose, a name which he disliked. He called her 'Joséphine.When Napoleon joins his army in March 1796, he found himself in command of 37,000 men who are demoralized, badly fed and unpaid. During April he led them in a series of rapid victories which vastly raised the soldiers' spirits and held out the promise of rich loot under this energetic young commander.In fifteen days he gained six victories, took twenty-one colours and fifty-five pieces of artillery, seized several fortresses and conquered the richest parts of Piedmont. In time he met with the fateful battle of waterloo.On August 7  Napoleon was transferred to the Northumberland for the long journey to St Helena, the rocky island in the Atlantic which Britain used as a staging post for ships sailing to and from the east. Here, living with a small staff of his own in the island's main house, Longwood, Napoleon spent the remaining six years of his life.The visitors became fewer and his life much bleaker for two reasons - the arrival in 1816 of Hudson Lowe as the governor of the island (antipathy between him and Napoleon is exacerbated by Lowe's many acts of pettiness), and the onset of disease. From the end of 1817 Napoleon was increasingly ill - officially from cancer of the stomach, which the doctors declared to be the cause of his death in 1821. But the circumstances make possible, and perhaps inevitable, frequent claims that he was the victim of poisoning (modern scientific tests on strands of his hair, kept as mementoes, are said to reveal an unusually high level of arsenic). Napoleon, by contrast,was a provincial boy in Europe's largest and most sophisticated kingdom. He first achieved the apparently impossible task of rising to become head of state, with almost limitless power. He then imposed his will on the rest of continental Europe, maintaining a dominant role for France through his military, administrative and diplomatic skills and by the sheer power of his personality.