The Napoleonic Period

A hyperlinked, profusely illustrated timeline of all the important events (and many of the minor ones) of the Napoleonic Age, illustrated and hyperlinked to books and articles on the Internet because …


… in reading history, one can be frustrated by an author who says something like “General Blatherley’s troops occupied Somewheresville on September 15.” September 15 of what year, please? And what happened to cause General Blatherley to do that? Then the reader has to flip back and forth in the book and deduce what is happening and when. Keeping dates and events straight is often tricky. To help the poor history student who has not memorized the calendars of entire centuries, this chronological listing of the events of the Napoleonic Era, starts with the birth of Suvorov on November 24, 1729, and ends with Sarah Bernhardt’s portrayal of Napoleon II in Rostand’s L’Aiglon on March 15, 1900.


The entries include hyperlinks to articles and books that expand on the many events of those amazing times, not only battles and campaigns, treaties and decrees, but news about the arts and sciences and social movements, to give a better feel for the era and how our age grew out of those years. The great events are never complete in and of themselves: Ben Franklin’s lightning rod had a lot to do with the outcome of the American Revolution and with French fashions in ladies’ hats—and with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.


History and the arts intertwine endlessly: the great French artists of Napoleon’s time--like Gros, David, and Gericault--were part of his propaganda machine. Our modern labor movement can be traced back to the Luddites of the 18th and 19th centuries (or perhaps even further to the gains made by European peasants as a result of the Black Death). The Pope became officially infallible as part of the reaction to the Age of Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars.


Did you know that Napoleon issued the first patent for an internal combustion engine or that he had an 18th-century wide-area network? That his sister posed in the nude for the Italian artist Canova? That he once played chess against a robot Turk? Or that Joseph Bonaparte may have originated the custom of honeymooning at Niagara Falls? How did his nephew, Achille, Murat, end up in St. Augustine, Florida? What happened to Napoleon’s “Cleopatra,” Pauline Fourès? It’s all here in an easily accessible format that unfolds onto the World Wide Web.