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Napoleon Bonaparte’s rise, triumphs, and collapse are told through the battles that reshaped Europe, from Toulon and Austerlitz to Trafalgar, Spain, Russia, and Waterloo. This fast-paced history explainer follows the Corsican artillery officer who studied Caesar, seized power in France, crowned himself emperor, and tried to dominate the continent while Britain stayed out of reach.
The story moves from brilliant strategy to disastrous overreach: the destruction of the French fleet at Trafalgar, the trap at Austerlitz, the brutal Peninsular War, the march into Russia, and the retreat from Moscow. It also shows how guerrilla warfare, scorched earth tactics, and the final defeat at Waterloo ended an empire built on ambition, discipline, and relentless war.
Perfect for viewers who enjoy military history, European history, historical documentaries, and animated history storytelling. It is also a strong choice for students, history fans, and anyone searching for Napoleon explained, the Napoleonic Wars, Battle of Austerlitz, Battle of Trafalgar, the invasion of Russia, or the Battle of Waterloo in a clear, engaging format.
The story moves from brilliant strategy to disastrous overreach: the destruction of the French fleet at Trafalgar, the trap at Austerlitz, the brutal Peninsular War, the march into Russia, and the retreat from Moscow. It also shows how guerrilla warfare, scorched earth tactics, and the final defeat at Waterloo ended an empire built on ambition, discipline, and relentless war.
Perfect for viewers who enjoy military history, European history, historical documentaries, and animated history storytelling. It is also a strong choice for students, history fans, and anyone searching for Napoleon explained, the Napoleonic Wars, Battle of Austerlitz, Battle of Trafalgar, the invasion of Russia, or the Battle of Waterloo in a clear, engaging format.
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00:00From a man who single-handedly took over most of Europe, to shooting a frozen lake to drown the enemy,
00:07to walking in front of a firing squad and telling them to shoot you in the chest, this is the
00:13Napoleonic Wars Explained.
00:15And it all comes from one kid on an island with a funny accent who decided he was going to
00:20be the next Julius Caesar.
00:22But first, we gotta go back to 1793, cause that's the year France put its own king on trial, found
00:29him guilty, and cut off his head.
00:32And every other king in Europe watched that and had the exact same thought, what if I'm next?
00:38So Austria, Prussia, Britain, and Spain came for France.
00:43But France didn't back down, cause they weren't fighting for a king anymore, they were fighting for themselves.
00:49And it turns out, that works really well.
00:52And somewhere in that mess was a 24-year-old artillery officer from Corsica.
00:58His name was Napoleon Bonaparte, and he wasn't really French.
01:02Not to the French anyway, cause he grew up on Corsica, an island France bought from Italy the year before
01:09he was born.
01:09And he had an accent his classmates made fun of him for.
01:12When France went to war, his family was too broke to buy him a spot in the cavalry.
01:17So they stuck him in the artillery.
01:19And while the rich kids were out riding horses, Napoleon was in his room reading the same books over and
01:26over.
01:282,000-year-old biographies of the greatest men of Greece and Rome.
01:32And the one he couldn't put down was Julius Caesar, a guy from a fancy old family with no money,
01:39who took command of an army, and then an empire.
01:42So a poor kid with a funny accent decided that's who he was going to be.
01:47And people noticed.
01:48Cause the leader of Corsica, Pasquale Paoli, once told him, there's nothing modern in you.
01:54You're entirely out of Plutarch.
01:56And Napoleon bragged about that line for the rest of his life.
02:00Oh, sir, you do know how Caesar's story ends, right?
02:04So keep that in mind.
02:06Cause Napoleon was never chasing land.
02:09He was chasing a name in the history books.
02:11But first, he had to learn how to actually win a battle.
02:15And artillery is where he figured out strategy.
02:18Cause in December of 1793, France's biggest naval port on the Mediterranean, a city called Toulon, had been taken by
02:26the British.
02:26And every French commander wanted to storm the walls head on.
02:30But Napoleon looked at the map and noticed a hill everyone else ignored.
02:35Cause whoever held that hill could shell the harbor.
02:38And if the harbor wasn't safe, the fleet had to leave.
02:42And a city that can't be supplied will eventually starve to death.
02:46So he took the hill.
02:47And Toulon fell almost immediately.
02:50All right, so looks like we're going to take the ocean first, right, sir?
02:55Oh, the hill.
02:57Yeah, no, I saw it.
03:00By 1796, Napoleon had command of the French army in Italy, which was the worst army France had.
03:07Oh, and two days before he left for it, he married a widow named Josephine.
03:12Six years older, way better connected, and the one person he'd be thinking about on the day he died.
03:19Remember her.
03:20Anyways, these guys were unpaid, unfed, and losing badly.
03:25But he transformed the army, beat Austria, and took back northern Italy.
03:30But then he got a little greedy.
03:32Cause in 1798, he sailed to Egypt with 35,000 men to cut off Britain's road to India.
03:39And it started off pretty great.
03:41But then he ran into a British admiral named Horatio Nelson.
03:46Missing an arm, blind in one eye, and the most aggressive man who ever commanded a British fleet.
03:52You see, Nelson found the French fleet anchored in Aboukir Bay and destroyed it in one night.
03:5911 of 13 ships were gone.
04:01So, Napoleon had an entire army stranded on the wrong continent with no way home.
04:07So, what did he do?
04:09He got on a boat, left them there, and sailed home alone.
04:13Sir, where are you going?
04:17But news traveled slow.
04:19So, by the time he walked into Paris, nobody knew he just abandoned an entire army in Egypt.
04:25All they knew was that the hero who won Italy was home.
04:28So, on November 9th, 1799, Napoleon walked into the French legislature with soldiers
04:34and walked back out running the entire country.
04:37And five years later, on December 2nd, 1804, he stood inside Notre Dame in front of the Pope,
04:43took the crown out of the Pope's hands, and put it on his own head.
04:48And look at what he walked into that cathedral wearing.
04:51Not a king's crown, but a wreath of golden laurel leaves.
04:55The exact thing his hero Caesar wore.
04:58Ten years before, he'd been an out-of-work officer with no command and no money.
05:03Now, he was 35 years old and the Emperor of France.
05:07But he had one problem.
05:09And it's the one he'd spend his life failing to solve.
05:12Cause every enemy Napoleon had could be reached by road.
05:16Every single one, except Britain.
05:19And between him and Britain sat 21 miles of water, in the best navy that has ever existed.
05:26So, he decided to cross it.
05:28By 1803, roughly 150,000 men were camped on the cliffs at Boulogne,
05:34with 2,000 flat-bottom boats built for one job, getting an army onto the English beach.
05:40Napoleon said it himself.
05:43Let us be masters of the channel for six hours, and we are masters of the world.
05:48But to get six hours, he had to move the Royal Navy out of the way.
05:53So, he sent Admiral Pierre Charles Villeneuve running for the West Indies to get the British
05:58to chase after him, then double back and hold the channel.
06:02And at first, it worked.
06:04But then Villeneuve lost his nerve, ran south to Cadiz, and sat there.
06:09So, Napoleon, furious, ordered him back out to sea.
06:13And on October 21st, 1805, off a cape in southern Spain called Trafalgar,
06:19Villeneuve came out with 33 ships and found 27 British ships waiting for him.
06:24And in command of those 27 was Nelson, the same one-armed admiral who wrecked his fleet in Egypt.
06:31You see, back then, two fleets lined up side by side and hammered each other for hours.
06:36It was slow, and it almost never actually sank anything.
06:40But Nelson had zero interest in that.
06:43He sent out a signal to every sailor in the fleet.
06:46England expects that every man will do his duty.
06:50Translation, we fight or we die.
06:53So, he split his fleet into two columns and drove them front first straight at the middle of the enemy
06:59line.
07:00Which meant for close to an hour, his lead ship sailed right into the enemy's guns with no way to
07:06shoot back.
07:07Then the columns hit, and the enemy line came apart into pieces.
07:12Nelson's flagship, Victory, locked holes with the French ship Redoubtable.
07:16Close enough that the two crews were throwing grenades into each other's rigging.
07:20And that's when a French marksman up in the rigging spotted Nelson on the deck and fired.
07:26The ball went through Nelson's shoulder and into his spine.
07:30So, they carried him below.
07:31And for three hours, while the battle finished above his head, his officers kept coming down to give him the
07:38count.
07:41And when the smoke cleared, the Royal Navy had captured or destroyed 18 enemy ships and lost zero.
07:54Then, they put Nelson's body in a cask of spirits to preserve it for the trip home.
07:59Ah, gone too soon, sir.
08:02Thirsty?
08:03Anybody?
08:04And that was the end of it.
08:06The French invasion of Britain wasn't delayed.
08:09It was over.
08:11But Napoleon didn't find out in time to care.
08:14Cause weeks before Trafalgar, he had broken camp at Boulogne, turned all 150,000 men around, and marched them east.
08:23Cause Austria and Russia had just declared war on him.
08:26So, now it was time for Napoleon to put his battle genius to the test.
08:31And what he did next is still taught in every military school on the planet.
08:36On December 2nd, 1805, exactly one year to the day since he crowned himself,
08:42Napoleon met the combined armies of Russia and Austria near a Moravian village called Austerlitz.
08:48He had around 68,000 men.
08:50They had close to 85,000.
08:53And the French held the high ground, a long ridge called the Pratsen Heights.
08:58But he pulled his own men off those heights and let the enemy stroll up and take it for free.
09:03Then he stretched his right flank thin and weak on purpose.
09:07And to sell it, he sent an envoy asking about peace terms.
09:11So the two emperors watching would think he was scared.
09:14And Tsar Alexander I, 28 years old and desperate to be the man who finally beat Napoleon, totally bought it.
09:21So at dawn, the Allies came pouring down off the heights to crush the weak flank, in fog so thick
09:28they could barely see.
09:30But Napoleon had already sent for Marshal Louis-Nicolas Davao, whose corps covered 70 miles in two days to get
09:37there.
09:38They walked off the road straight into the fighting and held the flank.
09:42Barely.
09:42As the sun burned through the fog, Napoleon saw the Pratsen Heights standing wide open, marched his army on top
09:49of it, and chopped the Allied army in half.
09:52But the coldest move of the whole day came at the very end.
09:56Because once the French punched through at Sokolnitz, the entire Allied left wing was cut off, with the French army
10:03between them and every friend they had.
10:05So the only way out was south, over a chain of frozen ponds.
10:11And Napoleon saw it coming.
10:13So he hauled his guns onto a nearby hill, looked down at thousands of men picking their way across the
10:19ice, and told his gunners to fire at the ground.
10:22The frozen ponds collapsed underneath an entire wing of the Allied army.
10:27Dozens of Russian cannons went straight to the bottom.
10:30By the end of the day, French losses came to around 8,500.
10:35Russian and Austrian losses landed between 27,000 and 36,000, counting prisoners.
10:42But the numbers weren't the real damage.
10:44Because Austria quit, leaving the Russians to fight on their own.
10:49So then Prussia, who sat out Austerlitz, decided it was their turn.
10:54But on October 14, 1806, Napoleon wrecked half the Prussian army at Jena.
10:59While Davao, badly outnumbered, wrecked the other half at Auerstedt the same day.
11:05The best army in Europe was finished in six hours.
11:09And on June 14, 1807, Napoleon beat the Russians at Friedland.
11:15And Tsar Alexander asked for peace.
11:18From Spain to Poland, the continent now belonged to Napoleon.
11:22But Britain was still out there.
11:24Still untouchable.
11:26Still writing checks to everybody who fought the French.
11:30So Napoleon came up with a new plan.
11:32If he couldn't invade Britain, he'd bankrupt it.
11:36On November 21, 1806, he issued the Berlin Decree, creating what became known as the Continental System.
11:44Every port in Europe slammed shut to British goods.
11:48But there was a catch.
11:50Cause to close every port in Europe, you have to control every country in Europe.
11:54And two of them were about to fight back.
11:58The first one was Spain.
11:59Which is hilarious, cause Spain was Napoleon's ally.
12:03But Portugal wouldn't shut its ports.
12:05So in 1807, Napoleon marched an army through Spain and took Lisbon.
12:11Then in 1808, he shot the Spanish king off the throne and put his brother Joseph Bonaparte on it.
12:17And he honestly expected the Spanish people to just be fine with that.
12:21So on May 2, 1808, Madrid rioted.
12:25Regular people with kitchen knives and paving stones against the French cavalry.
12:30It was a massacre.
12:32The number of Madrid citizens killed is unknown.
12:35And the next morning, the French marched the men they'd rounded up to a hill outside the city and shot
12:41them in batches through the night.
12:43But Spain didn't break.
12:45It did the exact opposite.
12:47Cause on July 19, 1808, at Bailen, a Spanish army surrounded a French corps at open country and forced 18
12:55,000 men to surrender.
12:57A French army under Napoleon had never surrendered in the field.
13:02Ever.
13:03News of the defeat spread all over Europe.
13:05So then, the rest of Spain did something Napoleon had no answer for.
13:10Small groups of local men hitting couriers, supply wagons, and stragglers,
13:15then vanishing into the hills before anybody could catch them.
13:19The Spanish called it Coria.
13:21The Little War.
13:23And as a result, messages stopped arriving and wounded men stopped being found.
13:28A French soldier in Spain was never safe, anywhere, for six straight years.
13:34And then, Britain landed an army in Portugal under a man Napoleon's marshals would spend the next six years underestimating.
13:42Arthur Wellesley, later the Duke of Wellington, had made his name waging war in India.
13:48He was cold, blunt, and obsessed with victory.
13:51But the men he brought were not gentlemen.
13:54They came out of the poorest corners of Britain and Ireland, and plenty signed up to get away from a
14:00jail cell or worse.
14:01And Wellington knew exactly what he had.
14:04I don't know what effect these men will have upon the enemy.
14:08But by God, they terrify me.
14:11Me too, sir!
14:13But in 1810, Wellington pulled off the most patient thing anybody did in this entire war.
14:19Cause over one winter, he had thousands of Portuguese laborers secretly build the lines of Torres Vedras.
14:26They cut away hillsides, blocked roads, and dammed streams.
14:30And created a 30-mile-long wall across the front of Lisbon.
14:34Then he pulled his army in behind it and stripped every field out front bare.
14:39So when Marshal André Masséna's army came up that road, they found a wall nobody in France knew existed.
14:46And nothing to eat for a hundred miles.
14:49They starved in front of it for months.
14:52Then they turned around and walked home.
14:54Over 350,000 French troops ended up down there.
14:59And roughly 200,000 of them did nothing but guard roads.
15:03Napoleon even had a name for it.
15:05He called Spain the ulcer.
15:08But while that ulcer was quietly bleeding him out, he looked east.
15:12And made the worst decision anybody has ever made with an army.
15:17Cause by now, Napoleon's ego was out of control.
15:20In 1810, he divorced Josephine cause she couldn't give him a son.
15:25And married an 18-year-old Austrian princess instead.
15:29And when the boy finally arrived in March 1811, Napoleon gave a newborn baby a title.
15:35The King of Rome.
15:37Sir, the Caesar thing is getting a little on the nose.
15:40He had a dynasty, a continent, and just one problem left.
15:45Sir Alexander had quit the continental system, and Russian ports were wide open to British goods again.
15:52So, on June 24, 1812, Napoleon crossed the Neiman with more than 450,000 men drawn from around 20 nations.
16:01The largest force Europe had ever put in one place.
16:05And the plan was simple.
16:07Find the Russian army.
16:08Destroy it in one battle.
16:10Make Alexander sign.
16:12But the Russians wouldn't fight.
16:14They just walked east.
16:16And as they went, they burned their own grain, their own barns, and their own villages.
16:22Anything a French soldier could eat or sleep in, gone.
16:25So, the Grand Army marched into a country emptied on purpose.
16:30And in the summer heat, with dirty water and no shelter, typhus and dysentery tore through the ranks.
16:36Tens of thousands were gone before either side fired a shot.
16:40The Russians were commanded by grizzled veteran Mikhail Kutuzov, 66 years old, a man who had taken a musket ball
16:49clean through his head twice and lived, and the only Russian general willing to trade cities for time.
16:56And even he knew he had to make a stand somewhere.
17:00So, he picked a stretch of farmland near a village called Borodino, about 70 miles from Moscow, and dug in.
17:07Arrow-shaped earthworks on his left called the Bagration Flesh and an open-backed fort in the center holding 19
17:14heavy guns, the Rajevsky Redoubt.
17:16And on September 7th, 1812, roughly 250,000 men fought in a space just a few miles wide.
17:25This time, Napoleon, who was sick with fever, didn't have a clever move.
17:30He stayed back and sent men straight into the earthworks.
17:33The flesh changed hands over and over.
17:36The Redoubt was taken, lost, then taken again.
17:40By afternoon, the Russian line was bent almost to snapping, and Napoleon's marshals begged him to send in the Imperial
17:48Guard, the best infantry on earth, untouched in reserve.
17:52But Napoleon said no.
17:54Nearly 2,000 miles from home, he wasn't spending his last reserve.
17:59So, the Russian line held.
18:02And when it was over, the two armies had lost around 72,000 men in one day.
18:07That would be the bloodiest day of any war on earth until 1914.
18:1472,000.
18:15In one day.
18:17And it didn't even decide anything.
18:20Then on September 14th, 1812, Napoleon rode up to Moscow and waited outside the gates for the city officials to
18:27hand him the keys.
18:29And nobody came.
18:31Cause Moscow was empty.
18:33Out of roughly 270,000 people, nearly all had already gone.
18:39He had taken the second city of the Russian Empire, and there was nobody in it to surrender.
18:44Then that night, the fire started.
18:47The governor, Fyodor Rostopchin, had lit the city on fire.
18:51So over four days, about three quarters of Moscow burned.
18:56And Napoleon rode out of the Kremlin through streets in flames.
18:59So, he sat in the wreckage for five weeks, writing to Alexander, waiting for a peace offer.
19:06And the Tsar never even answered him.
19:09On October 19th, 1812, the army left Moscow.
19:14And Kutuzov made sure they went home the same way they'd come.
19:18Back down the road, they had already stripped bare.
19:21Then the temperature dropped.
19:23Men froze.
19:25Horses dropped and were eaten where they fell.
19:28Cossacks rode the edges of the column day and night, picking off anybody who lagged behind.
19:34And between November 26th and 29th, 1812, what was left of that army reached the Berezina River
19:41and found it unfrozen and the bridges gone.
19:44So, French engineers went in chest deep in the ice,
19:48building two bridges by hand out of whatever they could tear down.
19:52Most were dead within weeks.
19:54But it worked.
19:56Tens of thousands got across.
19:58Then, on December 5th, 1812, Napoleon handed over command, climbed into a sleigh, and rode for Paris.
20:06And the last organized force out of Russia was the rearguard under Marshal Michel Ney,
20:12an innkeeper's son the army called the bravest of the brave.
20:16His men swore Ney was the last Frenchman off Russian soil, walking out with a musket like a private.
20:22And out of the more than 450,000 who crossed that river in June, roughly 380,000 never came back.
20:31But here's the insane part.
20:33Napoleon wasn't done.
20:35Because by the spring of 1813, the emperor had raised another army out of teenagers called up years early.
20:43The veterans nicknamed them the Marie-Louises, after the young empress.
20:48And he won battles with them.
20:49But he couldn't replace the 100,000 horses he lost in Russia.
20:54So he didn't have cavalry to chase a beaten army, meaning he couldn't deliver the killing blow.
21:00And on the flip side, everybody he had ever beaten was lining up at once.
21:04Russia, Prussia, Austria, Sweden, and Britain.
21:08Together for the first time.
21:10So from October 16th to 19th, 1813, they met at Leipzig in what people now call the Battle of the
21:18Nations.
21:18More than half a million men on one field.
21:21In the biggest battle in Europe until the First World War.
21:25After three days, Napoleon had to pull his army back out through the city over one bridge.
21:30But a corporal guarding that bridge panicked and blew it early.
21:34While it was still packed with French troops.
21:37So around 30,000 men were stranded on the wrong bank and captured.
21:42Men even drowned trying to swim it.
21:45After that, it was just a matter of time.
21:48On March 31st, 1814, the Allies rode into Paris.
21:52And on April 6th, 1814, Napoleon formally stepped down from power.
21:58But they didn't kill him.
22:00They gave him Elba, a small island off Italy.
22:03And let him keep the title of emperor.
22:05Emperor of 12,000 people.
22:08Hey, it's something, sir.
22:10And for 10 months, he actually ran it.
22:13He reorganized the roads, the mines, and the schools.
22:16Until one day, he picked up a French newspaper and found out Josephine was dead.
22:22Nobody had even bothered to tell him.
22:24The man who had stared down two emperors at Austerlitz walked into his room, shut the door, and didn't come
22:32out for two days.
22:33Man, I'm so sorry, sir.
22:36But after some time to think, Napoleon kicked open the door and walked out with a vengeance.
22:42On February 26th, 1815, Napoleon loaded roughly 1,000 men onto a few boats and sailed back to France.
22:50And the king sent the 5th Regiment to stop him.
22:53On a road near Lafri, a line of French soldiers with loaded muskets faced the man they used to call
23:00emperor.
23:01So Napoleon walked out in front of them alone and opened his coat.
23:05If there's any man among you who would kill his emperor, here I am.
23:10The entire regiment refused to kill him.
23:14He was in Paris on March 20th, 1815 without having to fire a shot.
23:19The king ran for it.
23:21And Europe declared war on one man by name.
23:24Which brings us to a muddy field in Belgium.
23:27On June 18th, 1815, Napoleon had about 73,000 men facing Wellington's roughly 68,000.
23:35And Marshal Gebhard von Blücher's Prussians, another 50,000, were marching hard to join him from the east.
23:42So Napoleon had to break Wellington before Blücher arrived.
23:46But it had poured all night, and the ground was soup.
23:51Cannonballs buried themselves in mud instead of skipping through infantry.
23:55So he waited until noon for it to dry out.
23:58But those few hours cost him everything.
24:01The battle opened at a walled farm called Huguenot, which was only meant to be a distraction.
24:06Instead, it swallowed up 33 French battalions in a day.
24:11French troops smashed through the north gate, and a handful of cold-streamed guards shoved it shut with enemy soldiers
24:17already inside.
24:19Wellington said the whole battle turned on closing that gate.
24:23In the center, the farmhouse of Les Assants was held by the king's German legion until they ran out of
24:29cartridges.
24:30And when it fell, a hole opened in Wellington's line.
24:33And that's when Ney, the bravest of the brave, saw British troops shifting behind the ridge and decided they were
24:40running.
24:40But they weren't.
24:42Ney threw roughly 9,000 cavalry at the British center with no infantry behind them.
24:48So the redcoats packed into tight squares, bayonets out on every side, stopping the horses in their tracks.
24:55Meanwhile, the Prussians slammed into the French right at Planois and would not stop coming.
25:00So around 7 in the evening, Napoleon played his last card and sent in the Imperial Guard.
25:07In 20 years of war, they had never been broken.
25:10But British and Dutch troops lying flat in the wheat stood up at close range and fired into them.
25:16And the guard stopped, then stepped backwards.
25:20And a shout went down the French line that nobody in that army had ever heard.
25:25La garde recue.
25:27The guard is falling back.
25:29The army came apart in minutes.
25:32When it was done, Wellington had around 17,000 casualties.
25:36Blücher, about 7,000.
25:38And the French, north of 25,000.
25:41With tens of thousands more scattered or captured.
25:44And Wellington, who never handed out compliments, called it the nearest run thing you ever saw in your life.
25:52Translation, that was close.
25:54But this time, nobody was giving Napoleon a comfortable little island off the coast of Italy.
25:59So they put him on St. Helena, a volcanic rock in the South Atlantic, more than 1,000 miles from
26:06the nearest mainland.
26:07A damp house with rats in the walls, a garrison of soldiers, and a governor who refused to call him
26:13emperor.
26:14But was Napoleon sorry?
26:16Not even a little.
26:17He blamed the British, his marshals, and even wrote in his will that the English had murdered him.
26:23So Napoleon spent six years dictating his life story to anyone who'd hold a pen.
26:29And one of the very last things he worked on was a book about Julius Caesar.
26:33Every campaign, every battle, right down to the assassination.
26:37With notes on what Caesar should have done.
26:40A dying man on a rock at the end of the world, grading his hero's homework.
26:45Talk about a full circle moment.
26:48Then, too weak to stand, he wrote his will by hand.
26:51And the first thing he asked for wasn't a statue.
26:54It was to be buried on the banks of the Seine, with the French people he loved.
26:59And on May 5th, 1821, at 51 years old, he died.
27:04His last words, according to the people in the room, were France, the army, head of the army, and then
27:12one more.
27:14Josephine.
27:15Nay didn't even get that long.
27:17He was tried for treason and shot by a firing squad.
27:21Then came the bill.
27:23Across roughly 20 years of fighting, close to 2 million soldiers were killed.
27:27And once you count the civilians who died in the sieges, the famines, and the disease that followed the armies,
27:34the real number runs into the millions on top of that.
27:38Man, that's a whole generation of Europe gone.
27:42But here's the thing.
27:44He lost, and the world kept his ideas anyway.
27:48Because the Napoleonic Code is still the backbone of the law in dozens of countries.
27:53And he made careers open to talent instead of birth.
27:56Europe was so wrecked that the power sat down at the Congress of Vienna and built a peace so careful
28:02and so paranoid that the continent went 99 years without another general war.
28:08One man cost them a generation.
28:10And the peace they built out of the wreckage outlived every man who signed it.
28:15But while the British were defeating Napoleon in Europe, they were also waging war on the United States at the
28:22same time.
28:23From watching the White House burn to the ground, to a naval commander who refused to surrender, to a battle
28:30so legendary it was fought after the war was already over.
28:34This is the War of 1812 Explained, and it starts with the exact mess you just watched.
28:41So click right here, and let's go see what the Emperor's temper tantrum cost us.
28:46Flappy out.
28:46Flappy out.
28:47Flappy out.
28:47Flappy out.
28:47Flappy out.
28:47Flappy out.