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• Ethnic/religious
groups of Habsburg Empire
• Historical
breakup of Yugoslavia ('91-'09)
• Muslim
populations in European countries
• History
of Christianization of Europe
• Soviet
Union, Communist influence
• Map
of European ethnic groups
• Map of Fascism
in Europe (1922-75)
• History
of Islamic conquest in Europe
• Religions
& ethnic groups in Russia
• Detailed
map of French colonization
• Detailed
map of British colonization
• Napoleon's
conquests & legacy
• Ethnic
& religious map of pre-Nazi Poland
--MORE &
NON-ENGLISH--
• Pecs, Hungary: collision
point between
Muslim and Christian empires
• Auschwitz and Birkenau
• Poland's
resistance to Nazis in pictures
• Muhammad
cartoon crisis in pictures
• Stalin's
private summer home
• Ravenna:
capital of Gothic empire
• Czar Nicholas
II's Ukrainian palace
• European
traditional cultural costumes
• Inside the Vatican,
house of all wealth
• Banknotes/currencies
of Europe
• Croatia's
Dubrovnik, untarnished gem
--MORE
& NON-ENGLISH--
• Islamic Mujahidin
vs. Christian Spain
• Poland-Lithuania vs. Teutonic Order
• Nevskiy's Russia vs. German Crusaders
• Prussia
vs. France (Nazi Propaganda)
• Libya: Europe
will soon be Islamic
• Ivan the Terrible
vs. Muslim Tatars
• Soviet
Propaganda: Defeat of Germany
--MORE
& NON-ENGLISH--
• An analysis
of Mussolini's 1938 racialist legislation
• The disastrous
effects of Soviet collectivization on Kazakhstan
• Changing meaning
of Italian identity under Fascist rule
• Yugoslavia's independent
break from East and West
• The Galicians: the
Celts of Spain
• The modern
Macedonian Slavs and Alexander the Great
• An argument for
the Romanians' links to ancient Dacians
• Mussolini's
Italian death camp for Jews, Slovenes, and Marxists
• The disappeared
Jews of Hungary and the Arrow Cross regime
• The Gypsies in history and today,
Europe's public enemy
• History
of Jihad in Chechnya vs. Russians
• History
of the Muslim Tatars in Eastern Europe
• Post-WWII expulsion of 10 million
ethnic German civilians
• Ethnic
& religious history of Serbs, Croats, & Bosnians
• Breakaway
states and independence movements in Europe
• The ancient Germanic Runic alphabet
and Runestones
• Teutonic
Order and their 800-year legacy in Eastern Europe
• 460-year
struggle for Albanian homeland, and 540 for Kosovo
• 2,800-year-old white mummies of China,
bringers of Buddhism?
• Alexander the
Great's Greek descendents in Pakistan?
• Visual History
of Yugoslavia and its breakup (1918-2008)
--MORE
& NON-ENGLISH-- |
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Detailed Maps of
the legacy of Napoleon's conquests and the
reshaping of the European continent
by James Mayfield (Chairman, European Heritage Library)
 Print
this Article About
the Author Bibliography/Sources
Despite their reputation
for being weak-willed cowards prone to surrender, the French
have enjoyed a major part in shaping the history of the world
for the last 1,000 years. The most remarkable example of French
military and political dominance other than their colonization
of the world is the consistent triumph of Emperor Napoleon
Bonaparte of the First French Empire. In less than a decade,
Napoleon's French armies conquered most of Western Europe,
and had become so frightening that nearly every European power
set aside its differences and formed continental alliances
with the hopes that a combined offensive would defeat the
power-hungry "republican" absolute dictator. Indeed,
it took 7 Coalitions to ultimately destroy Napoleon's hopes
of a French-dominated Europe. The legacy of Napoleon is obvious
by the fact alone that when France annexed Spain during the
Napoleonic Wars, it gave nearly all of Spain's Latin American
colonies the opportunity to revolt and declare independence
without almost any resistance. Portugal, although not conquered
by Napoleon completely, was so weakened and distracted that
Brazil also saw the writing on the wall.
These EHL maps show the legacy
of Napoleon's French conquests. The first map shows the First
French Empire at its height, and shows the vassal states and
populations his conquests insighted with goals of future independence.
It also shows which countries voluntarily chose to ally with
France (versus being conquered and vassalized by Napoleon),
and the many Coalitions who opposed French expansionism. The
numbers (1st, 2nd...) over each country denotes
in which Coalition(s) that country participated. View the
legend to help understand the map. The second
map shows the geopolitical legacy of the Napoleonic Wars in
the Congress of Wien (Vienna) and how it restructed Europe
forever (see below).
The Napoleonic Wars lasted
from roughly 1803-1814, when the revolution-torn nation of
France stunned the continent with a nearly global campaign
of conquest and seeming invincibility. The wars began between
France and Great Britain, two bitter rivals immemorial, but
quickly drew in the rest of the continent in 7 wars to follow.
Even the Muslims of the Ottoman empire aided their hated Christian
rivals in hopes of obliterating French hegemony. Napoleonic
France only enjoyed the passive alliance of Denmark-Norway,
a united kingdom that sought to protect its naval maritime
interests from British supremacy that it now enjoyed. By the
time of Napoleon's fall, he had created more than a dozen
political units as vassals that in many cases set the stage
for national aspirations after his defeat at Waterloo. Napoleon's
invasion gave their Polish allies the national cohesion to
lead a national revolt against the hated Russians, a heroic
event in Polish culture that was not forgotten during World
War II and the subsequent Soviet period. French ideas borne
of the French Revolution also spread throughout the continent,
although this liberalism only was successful in a global phenomenon
of written constitutional law; the modern ideas of multi-cultural
and secular liberalism with a weak government failed miserably,
as Europe pursued a path of radical anti-liberalism for the
next century. It is ironic that Napoleon, today lionized as
a hero of liberalism and revolution in France and America,
was one of the most belligerent and absolutist dictators of
the 19th century. Napoleon eventually conquered most of western
Germany, vassalizing its states into the so-called "Confederation
on the Rhein" (or Rhine) that soon dissolved into new
anti-French belligerents. The main rivals to Napoleon's dominance
were Great Britain, Russia, Prussia, and Austria. Even Prussia
(which was occupied) and Austria for a time seemed on the
brink of total annihilation.
The humiliating invasion
of Russia in 1812 decimated Napoleon's troops, forever imbuing
his men with attrition and morale loss, opening the way for
the ultimate obliteration of Napoleon's troops at Leipzig
and the subsequent Allied triumphs, after which Napoleon was
banished to the island of Elba in 1814. Stunningly, Napoleon
soon returned with a reborn army to regain authority over
France and his subjects, but was quickly annihilated in the
Battle of Waterloo in 1815 by the combined
might of Prussia and Britain. Napoleon was then banished to
the island of St. Helena off the coast of West Africa. France's
republican and Napoleonic institutions were abolished, and
the Bourbon dynasty was restored to the French throne. Few
political masters have fallen so bitterly, even rejected by
much of France due to the total ruin and bankruptcy to which
he consigned the nation that he, only a few years prior, had
brought to near global supremacy. Napoleon III, who similarly
seized the throne after a liberal revolution, attempted to
emulate Bonaparte's triumphs, but became the humiliation of
the French nation when he was crushed by the Germans in the
Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1871.
Click the below map
for the full-size version! Click on the map again to zoom.
After the defeat of Napoleon
at Leipzig and the subsequent battle of Waterloo, the victorious
continental powers of Europe met at the Congress of Wien
(or Vienna) in 1814 to determine the fate of the
entire continent from the ashes of Napoleon's global empire.
This declaration ultimately gave modern Europe its face, and
set in motion the eventual unification of Italy and the rebirth
of the German nation. Piedmonte and Sardinia, as well as Naples
and Sicily, were merged, giving the foundation to the modern
Italian state. Denmark, which lost the war (as it was casually
allied with France), forfeited Norway to Sweden. The foundations
were also laid for the rebirth of the ancient kingdom of Germany.
The German Confederation was a loose-knit conglomeration of
German states in close union with Prussia and Austria, cementing
the birth of a modern pan-Germanic empire, although this loose
bond fell apart by 1866 as the predatory dominance of its
two Germanic leaders -- Prussia and Austria -- struggled for
control. Russia inherited much of Moldova (Bessarabia), dominated
nearly all of Poland (which Prussia had lost to Napoleon),
and inherited Finland from Sweden by conquest. Portugal and
Spain quickly lost nearly all of their colonies in the Americas
due to their complete inabilty to intervene when they could
barely survive in the face of Napoleon's invasions. The Holy
Roman Empire was formally dissolved, and the Habsburg Empire
became the Austrian Empire, even more formally dominated by
the ethnic German minority. Prussia was expanded immensely
due to its triumph in the war. France returned to a monarchy.
The Netherlands gained Belgium for the time being. The modern
layout of the continent owes itself to the Napoleonic Wars.
Click the below map
for the full-size version! Click on the map again to zoom.
My photo of Napoleon's tomb in Les Invalides in Paris (CLICK
TO ENLARGE)
Napoleon styled himself a Romanesque emperor and a beacon
of justice and prosperity (my photo from Napoleon's tomb)
(CLICK TO ENLARGE)
Napoleon adorned his posterity with the same semi-divine light
as he did himself. His son, Napoleon II, enjoyed this statue
that compared him to a Roman sovereign (CLICK TO ENLARGE)
________________________________________
ABOUT
THE AUTHOR:
James Mayfield is a historian
and the Chairman of the European Heritage Library. I have
a Cum Laude BA in History with a Minor in Germanic Studies
(language and history), am presently working for my Masters
in History, and plan to immediately progress to my PhD Doctorate.
I have a special academic interest in Europe's diverse ethnic
identities, languages, and cultures, and the political struggles
of native European and immigrant minority identities. See
my staff entry for more information.
BIBLIOGRAPHY/SOURCES
USED:
The image used as the basis
of the maps is the Nations Online Project, and the copyright
has been respected.
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