A son of the French Revolution, Napoleon embedded in French society the Revolution’s core goals of national unity, civil equality, a hierarchy based on merit and achievement, and a rural society based on private property rather than feudal obligations. To these he added the Civil Code, the Bank of France, and other reforms, but he was never able to establish a stable political regime, primarily because internal rule was always subject to the insatiable demands of his external empire.

Napoleon’s obsession with creating a European order under French hegemony came at the expense of perhaps 900,000 of his own people’s lives, and those of a greater number of other Europeans who fought him or who were drafted into his armies. For two million or more Frenchmen who served in the imperial armies, soldiering was a miserable experience: it meant physical privation, fear, disease, and death. But Napoleon’s legacy of horrific numbers of deaths was overcome by the romanticised pride of those who survived: the one million men discharged from the armies in 1814–15. Their tales were embellished across time as subsequent French regimes floundered in a Europe determined to establish a balance of power against any further French imperial fantasies. The power of Napoleon’s legend was also a deliberate creation by the emperor, during the six remaining years of his life, and his acolytes.