50 Fun Facts About Napoleonic Wars

Britain's declaration of war in May 1803 ended a brief peace signed at which town?

Amiens. The peace lasted only about 14 months: Britain refused to evacuate Malta as the treaty required, and the two powers were soon at war again.

Which 1805 battle, fought on the first anniversary of his coronation, is often called Napoleon's greatest victory?

Austerlitz. Napoleon deliberately weakened his right wing to tempt the Allies down off the Pratzen Heights, then stormed the heights and split their army in two.

In October 1805 Napoleon surrounded General Mack's Austrian army and forced its surrender at which Danube city?

Ulm. Rapid marching let Napoleon wheel his army round behind Mack and cut his retreat, and the trapped Austrians surrendered before their Russian allies could arrive.

Which British admiral died winning the Battle of Trafalgar in October 1805?

Nelson. A musket ball fired from the rigging of the French ship Redoutable struck him on his own quarterdeck, and he died below a few hours later, after hearing that enemy ships were surrendering.

Which admiral commanded the Franco-Spanish fleet defeated at Trafalgar?

Villeneuve. He learned that Napoleon was sending an officer to replace him, so he took the fleet out of Cádiz before the man could arrive, and ended the battle a British prisoner.

Napoleon's army for invading Britain trained from 1803 in a vast camp beside which French Channel port?

Boulogne. The invasion never sailed: in August 1805 Napoleon broke camp and marched the army east against Austria instead.

Which December 1805 treaty, signed in today's Bratislava, took Austria out of the Third Coalition?

Treaty of Pressburg. Austria gave up Venetia and the Tyrol and had to accept Napoleon's allies, the rulers of Bavaria and Württemberg, as kings.

Which league of German client states did Napoleon create in July 1806, with himself as its Protector?

Confederation of the Rhine. Its members walked out of the Holy Roman Empire, and within weeks Emperor Francis II laid down the imperial crown and the old empire was gone.

On 14 October 1806 Napoleon won at Jena while which marshal won at Auerstädt?

Davout. With a single corps, heavily outnumbered, he beat the main Prussian army, while Napoleon, a dozen miles away, was crushing what turned out to be the smaller force.

During his 1806 conquest of Prussia, Napoleon made a point of visiting whose tomb in Potsdam?

Frederick the Great. Napoleon rated the Prussian king among the great commanders, and is said to have told his officers they would not be standing there if Frederick were still alive.

In 1806 Napoleon carried off to Paris the four-horse chariot from atop which landmark?

Brandenburg Gate. The Quadriga went to Paris as a trophy and stayed eight years, until Napoleon's fall in 1814 let the Prussians bring it home.

Which February 1807 battle, fought against the Russians in a blinding snowstorm, ended in a bloody draw?

Eylau. A French attack blundered through the snow and was cut to pieces, and only a massed cavalry charge led by Murat saved Napoleon's centre.

Napoleon and Tsar Alexander I made peace in July 1807 at which town?

Tilsit. The two emperors first met on a raft moored in mid-river, and the peace they made stripped Prussia of about half its territory.

In 1807 Britain bombarded which capital to seize its fleet before Napoleon could?

Copenhagen. Days of shelling set much of the city ablaze and the Danes gave up their fleet, then stayed at war with Britain as Napoleon's ally until 1814.

In 1807 Napoleon handed his new Duchy of Warsaw to the king of which German state?

Saxony. Its king stayed loyal to Napoleon almost to the end, and it cost him: in 1815 much of his kingdom was handed to Prussia.

Napoleon's Berlin Decree of November 1806 established what?

The Continental System. It barred British goods from every port Napoleon controlled, but smuggling was rife, and enforcing the ban helped drag him into invading Russia.

Which brother did Napoleon install as King of Spain in 1808?

Joseph. Revolt drove him out of Madrid soon after he arrived, and though Napoleon put him back, the French generals in Spain took their orders from Paris, not from him.

Napoleon is said to have given the draining Peninsular War which bitter nickname?

The Spanish ulcer. For six years the war tied down hundreds of thousands of French soldiers, men Napoleon sorely needed once he turned on Russia.

Behind which secretly built fortifications near Lisbon did Wellington's army shelter in 1810?

Lines of Torres Vedras. Wellington had the countryside in front stripped of food, so Masséna's army sat starving before the forts for months and then retreated.

Which word for irregular fighters entered English from Spain's resistance to Napoleon in the Peninsular War?

Guerrilla. Spanish for 'little war', it named the peasant bands whose raids and ambushes wore the French down while Spain's regular armies kept losing battles.

Sir John Moore was killed at which January 1809 battle, fought at the end of a gruelling winter retreat across Spain?

Corunna. Moore's frozen, ragged army reached the port to find its transports had not yet arrived, so it had to turn and beat off the French before it could sail.

Which 1809 battle near Vienna, won by Austria's Archduke Charles, was Napoleon's first major defeat in a decade?

Aspern-Essling. With only part of his army over the Danube, the Austrians sent heavy barges downstream to wreck his bridges, and he had to pull back, losing Marshal Lannes.

Which marshal left the army in disgrace after Wagram and was elected Crown Prince of Sweden a year later?

Bernadotte. The Swedes remembered his kindness to their prisoners and wanted a soldier; three years later he led an army against Napoleon at Leipzig.

Britain's disastrous 1809 Walcheren Expedition up the Scheldt failed to reach which French-held naval base?

Antwerp. The army stalled in the marshy Scheldt islands, where fever killed about 4,000 men against roughly 100 lost in battle, and it sailed home without nearing the city.

Which innkeeper led Tyrol's 1809 peasant uprising against Bavarian and French rule?

Andreas Hofer. Betrayed by a neighbour for the reward on his head, he was shot at Mantua in 1810; the outcry was such that Napoleon later claimed it was done against his wishes.

Napoleon married which Austrian archduchess in 1810?

Marie-Louise. She gave Napoleon his longed-for son within a year, but when he fell in 1814 she ignored his pleas to join him in exile and went home to Vienna.

Napoleon's brother-in-law Joachim Murat ruled which kingdom?

Naples. He turned on Napoleon in 1814 to keep his crown, lost it anyway the next year, and was shot after landing in Calabria with a tiny band to win it back.

The Grande Armée crossed which river to invade Russia on 24 June 1812?

Niemen. Five years earlier Napoleon and the tsar had sealed their alliance on a raft moored in this same river; by December the wreck of his army was stumbling back across it.

Which disease began ravaging the Grande Armée within days of invading Russia in 1812?

Typhus. Sickness, hunger and desertion had cost Napoleon around 100,000 men before he fought a single major battle, months before the famous winter set in.

Which Russian commander's long retreat before Napoleon in 1812 caused such an outcry that the tsar replaced him with Kutuzov?

Barclay de Tolly. He gave ground and burned what he left behind until the uproar forced the tsar's hand; yet Kutuzov kept falling back too, all the way past Moscow.

Which 1812 battle on the road to Moscow was the bloodiest single day of the Napoleonic Wars?

Borodino. With the Russians near breaking, Napoleon refused to send in his Imperial Guard, so the battered enemy slipped away intact and his costly win decided nothing.

Who is widely blamed for ordering Moscow set ablaze as Napoleon entered in September 1812?

Count Rostopchin. Moscow's governor had the fire engines carted away before he left, yet in a pamphlet printed in Paris in 1823 he denied ever ordering the blaze.

Blocked at Maloyaroslavets in October 1812, Napoleon had to retreat along the ravaged road through which city he had taken in August?

Smolensk. Napoleon had hoped to go home through the untouched, well-stocked south; instead his army trudged hungry along a road it had already stripped bare on the way in.

In November 1812 Napoleon's engineers bridged which river to free his army from a Russian trap?

Berezina. Normally it would have been frozen hard enough to walk across, but a sudden thaw had set in, and thousands of stragglers were left behind on the wrong bank.

Which marshal, whom Napoleon called 'the bravest of the brave', commanded the rearguard on the retreat from Moscow?

Ney. Cut off from the main army, he led his men across the Dnieper by night and rejoined Napoleon with only a fraction of his corps still with him.

With Napoleon beaten at Leipzig in 1813 but still enthroned, Metternich's Frankfurt proposals offered him what?

Emperor within 'natural frontiers'. France would have kept the Rhine, the Alps and the Pyrenees, but Napoleon stalled, the offer lapsed, and within months he had lost his throne as well.

The 1813 clash at Leipzig is also known by what name?

Battle of the Nations. A corporal blew the only bridge out of the city too soon, while it was still packed with retreating French, and some 30,000 men were left behind to be captured.

Wellington's June 1813 victory at which battle finally broke French power in Spain?

Vitoria. The fleeing French abandoned a wagon train crammed with the loot of Spain, and the win would have been bigger had Wellington's men not broken off the chase to plunder it.

Which British prime minister was assassinated in 1812, mid-way through the wars?

Spencer Perceval. He was shot in the lobby of the House of Commons by John Bellingham, a merchant with a private grievance over compensation the government had refused him.

Which London financier won the government contract to supply Wellington's army with gold coin in the war's final years?

Nathan Mayer Rothschild. A Manchester cloth merchant not long before, he made his bank's name with the deal, and the allied governments went on to raise their war loans through his family.

British subsidies to continental allies were nicknamed what?

Golden Cavalry of St George. With only a small army of its own, Britain paid its allies millions to field theirs, and helped raise the money with a new invention of Pitt's, the income tax.

In April 1814, with the Allies in Paris, Napoleon signed his abdication at which palace?

Fontainebleau. He wanted to march on Paris, but in painful interviews his own marshals told him the army would not follow, and he signed away the throne.

Escaping Elba, Napoleon came ashore on 1 March 1815 near which town on France's south coast?

Cannes. He landed with a tiny force, the regiments sent to stop him went over to him instead, and within three weeks the king had fled and he was back in Paris without firing a shot.

Two days before Waterloo, Napoleon defeated the Prussians at which battle?

Ligny. The Prussians' 72-year-old commander, Blücher, was pinned under his shot horse and ridden over by cavalry, yet his army got away in good order and turned up two days later.

Which marshal, sent to chase the beaten Prussians, was still miles away when Napoleon lost at Waterloo?

Grouchy. He heard the guns of Waterloo but kept to the letter of his orders, and beat a Prussian rearguard at Wavre while the rest of their army marched off to crush Napoleon.

Why did Napoleon delay the start of Waterloo on the morning of 18 June 1815?

Waiting for the ground to dry. Overnight rain had left the fields too sodden for guns and cavalry to move, and the hours he lost gave the Prussians time to reach the field that afternoon.

After Waterloo, Napoleon gave himself up aboard which British warship?

HMS Bellerophon. He had reached Rochefort hoping to sail for the United States, but she was blockading the port; he asked Britain for refuge and was shipped to St Helena instead.

Which agreement of November 1815, signed after Waterloo, formally ended the Napoleonic Wars?

Second Treaty of Paris. After the Hundred Days the victors were less forgiving: France had to pay 700 million francs and feed an occupying army of 150,000 on its own soil.

For siding with Napoleon, Denmark was forced in 1814 to cede which country to Sweden?

Norway. The Norwegians refused to be bartered: they wrote their own constitution and chose a king, and after a brief war Sweden had to accept that constitution as the price of union.

Europe enjoyed no great-power war after 1815 until which conflict in 1853?

Crimean War. The line-up had flipped: Britain and France, enemies for generations, now fought side by side against Russia, Britain's partner in bringing Napoleon down.