On the morning of December 2, 1804, in the ancient cathedral of Notre-Dame, a man who had been born a Corsican nobody reached out and seized a crown that had been blessed by popes and worn by kings for a thousand years. He placed it on his own head.
The Pope, summoned from Rome to perform the ceremony, watched in silence.
Pope Pius VII had traveled across the Alps in winter expecting to crown an emperor, as his predecessors had crowned Charlemagne over a thousand years before. He had rehearsed the ancient words, blessed the sacred oils, lifted the crown from the altar with his own consecrated hands. And then Napoleon Bonaparte simply took it from him. The message could not have been clearer: I owe my power to no one. Not to God. Not to tradition. Not to the thousand years of European monarchy that preceded me. I am my own creation.
It was, perhaps, the most audacious act of self-creation in human history.
But how does a man become an emperor? How does an artillery officer from a backwater Mediterranean island come to stand in Notre-Dame Cathedral while the Pope serves as little more than a glorified prop? How does ambition transform from virtue into vice, from liberation into tyranny, from glory into ashes?
This is the story of Napoleon Bonaparte. Not the marble statue frozen in eternal triumph. Not the military genius reduced to a strategy game. Not the tyrant simplified into a cautionary tale. This is the story of a flesh-and-blood man who changed the world and was destroyed by his own success.
Born technically stateless—Corsica had been French for barely a year when he arrived, and his family had fought against French annexation. Sent to military school at age nine, speaking French with an accent so thick the other cadets mocked him as "straw in the nose." A boy who retreated into books while his tormentors laughed, building a fortress of knowledge that would one day make every king in Europe tremble at his name.
From the stone house on the Rue Saint-Charles in Ajaccio to the gray corridors of Brienne, from the chaos of Revolutionary Paris to the pyramids of Egypt, from Austerlitz to Moscow to Waterloo to a volcanic rock in the South Atlantic where he would die dictating his memoirs—this is the complete story of how the old world ended and the new world was born in blood and fire and genius and folly.
The crown he placed on his head did not appear from nowhere. It was forged in the fires of revolution. And the hand that lifted it was shaped by experiences that began in a family that counted their olive trees and worried about debts, in a household where food was sometimes scarce and a mother who beat her children when they misbehaved loved them with a fierce pride that never wavered.
She has the head of a man on the body of a woman, Napoleon said of his mother. She outlived him by fifteen years.