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Napoleon Bonaparte The Short Corsican Napoleon has often been regarded as the most talented (and shortest!) general of the last millennium, but his largest impact on Europe was after the wars. It is true that he led most of France¡¯s young men to their death, but the reason why is often unknown. France was already in shambles, but Napoleon turned the whole country into an armed camp. Although he was originally considered a great hero, his eventual defeat made him the creature of horror stories told by mothers to their children. Although he was always considered a Frenchmen, he was actually a native of Corsica, an island off the coast of the French-Italian border. His family lived in the coastal city of Ajaccio, which was where he was born on August 15,1769. None of his Ancestors had ever been a soldier, but his father had been a Corsican Patriot. Because his father later became a member of the French Aristocracy, he was educated in Paris at a military school at the expense of the French King. When Corsica declared independence from France in 1793, Napoleon and his family fled to France since they chose to remain faithful to France. His first command in the French army was when he participated in the Siege of Toulon during the revolt there. He took over the job of a wounded artillery general and succeeded in seizing important spots in the siege. The French government noticed him for the first time when he helped in forcefully pacifying a mob in Paris trying to overthrow the revolutionary government in 1795. The following year, he married Jos¨¦phine de Beauharnais who was the widow of a general guillotined during the revolution. In the same year, Napoleon was placed in command of the French army in Italy. Although his army was initially badly trained and ill equipped, he used his superior military-genius to defeat the King of Sardinia and four Austrian generals. His army was within 80 miles after of Vienna and so Austria sued for peace. Napoleon forced them to sign the Treaty of Campo Formio, thus ending the First Coalition.
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