Napoleon Bonaparte

Napoleone di Buonaparte was born in 1769 in Ajaccio, Corsica, just a year after France acquired the island from Genoa. He attended military school in France on a royal scholarship and graduated as an artillery officer at age sixteen. The upheaval of the French Revolution gave his ambition its opportunity: by twenty-four he was a general.

Through a series of brilliant Italian campaigns in the 1790s and an audacious coup in 1799, Napoleon made himself First Consul and then Emperor of the French. At his peak he controlled most of continental Europe, placing his siblings on the thrones of Holland, Spain, Westphalia, and Naples. His Napoleonic Code remains the basis of civil law in France and many other nations.

The catastrophic 1812 invasion of Russia, in which roughly 400,000 French soldiers died, broke his empire's back. A coalition of European powers defeated him in 1814 and exiled him to Elba. He escaped and returned to power for the Hundred Days before final defeat at Waterloo in 1815. He spent his remaining years in exile on the remote Atlantic island of Saint Helena.

Napoleon died in 1821, possibly from stomach cancer (though arsenic poisoning has been debated). He left behind a transformed Europe -borders redrawn, feudalism weakened, nationalism awakened. His legend has only grown since his death: he remains the most written-about individual in history.