Europe · The modern states
First French Empire
1804–1814/1815
Napoleon was proclaimed Emperor of the French by the Constitution of Year XII (18 May 1804) and crowned on 2 December 1804 at Notre-Dame, taking the crown from Pope Pius VII to crown himself. At its 1811–1812 peak the Empire comprised 130 departments and about 44 million people over ~2.1 million km².
- Existed
- 1804–1814/1815
- Shown on the map
- 1805–1814
- Peak area
- 1.2M km²
- Region
- Europe
Overview
Napoleon was proclaimed Emperor of the French by the Constitution of Year XII (18 May 1804) and crowned on 2 December 1804 at Notre-Dame, taking the crown from Pope Pius VII to crown himself. At its 1811–1812 peak the Empire comprised 130 departments and about 44 million people over ~2.1 million km². Key victories: Austerlitz (2 December 1805, over Austria and Russia), Jena–Auerstedt (14 October 1806, over Prussia), Friedland (14 June 1807, over Russia), Wagram (5–6 July 1809, over Austria). Major treaties: Pressburg (1805), Tilsit (1807), Schönbrunn (1809). The Continental System (Berlin Decree, 1806) sought to blockade Britain. The Russian campaign of 1812 destroyed the Grande Armée: per the World History Encyclopedia, "of the 615,000 French and allied troops who crossed the Niemen in June 1812, fewer than 100,000 would stagger back," with roughly 100,000 having deserted, 120,000 taken prisoner, and "the corpses of the remaining 380,000 troops… buried beneath the Russian snow." Defeat at Leipzig (16–19 October 1813) led to the invasion of France and Napoleon's abdication (6 April 1814, Treaty of Fontainebleau 11 April). Overall Napoleonic Wars deaths are conservatively put by Wikipedia's casualties article at 2.5 million military plus 1 million civilians (3.5 million total); David Gates estimated 5,000,000 died, and Charles Esdaile puts the figure at 5,000,000–7,000,000 overall including civilians.
Historiographical debate (Napoleon's legacy)
Liberal modernizer (spreader of legal equality, meritocracy, administrative rationalization) vs. despotic conqueror. Pieter Geyl's Napoleon: For and Against (1949) showed how each generation of French historians reinterpreted him according to its own politics.
Common questions
- What was the First French Empire?
- Napoleon was proclaimed Emperor of the French by the Constitution of Year XII (18 May 1804) and crowned on 2 December 1804 at Notre-Dame, taking the crown from Pope Pius VII to crown himself. At its 1811–1812 peak the Empire comprised 130 departments and about 44 million people over ~2.1 million km².
- When did the First French Empire exist?
- The First French Empire existed 1804–1814/1815. On this map it is drawn 1805–1814.
- How large was the First French Empire?
- At its greatest extent drawn on this map, the First French Empire covered about 1.2 million km². That is the largest area the border data gives it across the years it is drawn, not necessarily its greatest extent in history.
- How did the First French Empire end?
- Liberal modernizer (spreader of legal equality, meritocracy, administrative rationalization) vs. despotic conqueror. Pieter Geyl's Napoleon: For and Against (1949) showed how each generation of French historians reinterpreted him according to its own politics.
Sources
This compendium cites its sources once for the whole document rather than per territory. Its bibliography names the English Wikipedia articles for each polity as the primary basis, with Encyclopædia Britannica, the World History Encyclopedia, napoleon.org (Fondation Napoléon), the Deutsches Historisches Museum, and academic studies (H-France Review, the *Napoleonica* journal) on the Revolution's and Napoleon's contested death tolls and legacy. The article this entry is anchored on:
- Wikipedia — First French Empire en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_French_Empire
This entry was last updated .
This entry was researched and drafted with AI from the sources above, and has not been reviewed by a historian. How entries are made
Text available under CC BY-SA 4.0: reuse it with a credit to The World Through Time and a link to this page. Passages drawing on the Wikipedia articles listed above are also licensed CC BY-SA 4.0 by their contributors.
Border geometry for the map itself comes from Cliopatria v0.12 (Seshat Global History Databank, CC-BY-4.0).
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