Original subtitles

NAPOLEON: I have been condemned unheard.

This slow torture, this killing in detail,

is much less humane than if they ordered me to be shot at once.

200 years ago, Napoleon Bonaparte was taken across the Atlantic Ocean

into exile on the island of Saint Helena.

During the voyage, the Emperor of the French

played endless games of cards with his British military captors

and constantly raked over the past.

I was at the head of an army at 24.

At 30, from nothing, I had risen to be at the head of my country.

As Emperor, I should have died the day after I entered Moscow.

On the 14th October, 1815,

Napoleon caught his first sight of the island of Saint Helena.

"It's not an attractive place," he said despondently,

as he looked out over the vast mass of volcanic rock.

"I'd have done better," he said, "to have stayed in Egypt."

Napoleon's foreboding was justified,

since at the summer residence of the British Lieutenant Governor,

he lived the life of a hermit,

and he suffered an indignity and provincialism

that was profoundly at odds with the splendid palaces

and hero worship that he had once enjoyed.

Exile was never going to be easy

for a man who had ruled an empire of 45 millions.

But as Napoleon himself said,

"Other men's downfall diminished them,

"my own has only raised me to infinite heights."

And what heights this extraordinary man had achieved.

Victories whose names resonate in military history

and which won him the mastery of Europe.

BIRDSONG

Love of one's country is of all human instincts the most enduring.

It is innate in every child and it persists until death.

No feeling is more difficult to eradicate.

From his ruthless shooting of insurrectionists

in the streets of Paris in 1795,

to his defeat of Austria on the battlefield of Austerlitz in 1805.

From his resounding victory over Russia and Prussia

at the Battle of Friedland in 1807,

to his near-obliteration of Prussia that year.

From his Europe-wide blockade of British trade

to command of an empire of over 40 million people,

not to mention ownership of 39 palaces,

the career of the Corsican artillery officer turned dictator

turned Emperor of France was truly glorious.

Yet, it was in September 1812,

in these remote fields west of Moscow,

that Napoleon Bonaparte, now in his early 40s,

as ever devoted to the honour of France,

behaved in a way utterly at odds with the past.

And he made a major tactical error,

the first of a series of mistakes that would ultimately destroy him.

Here at Borodino, Napoleon adopted a strategy

that was unusually cautious.

His generals criticised him for this at the time

and historians have castigated him for it ever since.

His reasons were impeccable.

His caution however, unfortunately, proved ultimately self-defeating.

In the past, Napoleon had won important military victories

by outflanking the enemy.

But here at Borodino, in the early weeks

of the most daring military campaign of his career,

the invasion of Russia,

he followed a very different tactic.

He insisted upon a frontal attack on the enemy

and the battle that followed fast became a bloodbath.

In a small battlefield by Napoleonic standards,

only three miles by three miles,

a quarter of a million men fought for ten hours.

Two million rounds of ammunition were fired

and no fewer than 90,000 cannonballs.

So, every second, three cannonballs and seven bullets were fired,

which meant that there was a 30% chance of being killed or wounded.

And to be wounded pretty much meant

that your limb was going to be amputated.

One doctor alone, in the 24-hour period of the battle,

actually cut off 200 limbs.

It was a most monstrous massacre.

70,000 men were killed or wounded at Borodino,

over 27,000 of them French,

the bloodiest single day of battle until 1914.

On the evening after the battle,

Napoleon dined with two of his marshals.

According to Baron Bausset-Roquefort,

his chamberlain and prefect of the palace...

Contrary to custom, he was much flushed.

His hair was disordered and he appeared fatigued.

His heart was grieved at having lost so many generals and soldiers.

Napoleon had always been the most audacious of men

and the confidence and benevolence of his dictatorship

had served France well.

The Revolution of 1789

had been a great moment of hope for the country.

However, the overthrow of the monarchy and feudal aristocracy

was soon followed by chaos.

It's easy for us to forget the sheer collective trauma

that France underwent in the decade after 1789,

when the French Revolution broke out.

There was an invasion,

there was a terror which killed up to 40,000 people in Paris,

there was a collapse of the money markets and wild runaway inflation,

there was the abolition of the Catholic Church

after 1,000 years of history.

All these things came together to leave France traumatised

and the thing that brought them back together as a nation was Napoleon.

He was felt to be the saviour of France.

It had taken immense leadership, opportunism and innovation

to free France from that ordeal.

And it bred in Napoleon an, at times, breathtaking conceit.

As he once wrote...

If the Emperor desired any title,

it would be that of Caesar,

but the name has been dishonoured by so many petty princes.

The Emperor's title is Emperor of the French.

But the Emperor had every right to be proud since,

with the birth of an heir in 1811 by the Empress Marie-Louise,

he had founded a Bonaparte dynasty.

It helped to legitimise his rule.

The Emperor was delighted by his son,

writing to his former wife, Josephine...

My son is a big healthy child.

I trust he will do well.

He has my chest, my mouth and my eyes.

I trust he will fulfil his destiny.

However, to reinforce the security of France,

and because the Revolution had not spread to other parts of Europe,

Napoleon had been forced to work within

a system of international power set by the established monarchies,

terms framed by treaties and marriage alliances.

Against Britain,

the richest anti-revolutionary monarchist nation of all,

he levied global economic sanctions and further isolated Britain

by muscling Russia, Prussia and Austria into the sanctions regime.

Napoleon was extremely sensitive towards humiliation,

towards being humiliated as the Emperor of France

and of France being humiliated.

Unlike the Romanovs or the Hapsburgs or other great royal houses,

which had ruled Russia and Austria

and various other countries for generations,

he was the first generation of his own house.

And so, if he were to lose a battle

or to be outmanoeuvred in a diplomatic way

and if France was to be humiliated, it could cost him his throne.

The deal that Napoleon struck with Tsar Alexander at Tilsit in 1807

forced Russia into his economic blockade of British trade.

Napoleon's Anglophobia knew few bounds.

But it wasn't paranoia,

the British really WERE out to get him.

He once said, in a proclamation when he was First Consul...

People of France,

the English Government has betrayed the secret of its horrible policy,

to tear France asunder,

reduce her to the rank of a second-rate power.

These are the hideous successes for which England lavishes her gold,

her promises, and her intrigues.

However, the Continental blockade of Britain,

along thousands of miles of European coastline,

proved enormously complicated and nearly impossible to enforce.

To stem breaches in the blockade

and reinforce his isolation of Britain,

Napoleon now needed to implement a different strategy.

For centuries, Britain and Portugal had been allies.

During the blockade,

Portugal became an open door to Europe for British trade.

"In Lisbon," Napoleon said, "Britain had..."

..An inexhaustible spring of wealth,

a constant resource, both as a port of call

and as a base for naval expeditions.

To date, all of Napoleon's campaigns had been fought defensively,

now he went on the offensive.

In November 1807, he sent 24,000 men into Portugal,

and the next year 100,000 into Spain.

There they met their nemesis,

the greatest British soldier for 100 years -

the Duke of Wellington.

"All the circumstances of my disasters,"

Napoleon later said of that war,

"are bound up in that fatal knot."

The problem in Spain was that the revolutionary cause in the country,

and so sentiment for Napoleon, was just too weak.

The forces of reaction in the Church, aristocracy

and the peasantry were deeply entrenched.

The people defined themselves by their religion and locality,

and not by their class or political ideology.

So the French had to fight to occupy Spanish cities

and to stave off attacks from insurgent guerrillas.

They had to mount three separate invasions of Portugal

and pour more and more effort into the struggle,

never to realise total victory.

The morale of the French Army suffered badly.

War in Spain was astonishingly vicious.

French soldiers were tortured by the Spanish, decapitated,

skinned alive

and their genitals were mutilated.

A French captain wrote that prisoners were found...

..sawed asunder between the two planks.

One of my friends was buried alive in the ground, all but his head,

which served as a mark for the savages to play at bowls.

For the anti-revolutionary nations of Europe,

Napoleon's failure in Spain was a long-desired humiliation.

His empire was a first-generation construct, just a few years old,

and the asymmetric war that he was obliged to fight in the peninsula

stretched the army's skills to the limit.

To make matters worse, the entente cordiale

that Napoleon believed he had with the Tsar of Russia

was very definitely cooling.

At the very apex of international politics

there can't be such a thing as genuine friendship,

especially amongst rivals.

Yet Napoleon convinced himself

that he and the Tsar had a special bond over Britain.

He was wrong.

On Christmas Day, 1810,

the Tsar put out a decree which effectively meant

that Russia was going to be able to trade with Britain once more.

It was a major insult -

an attack on Napoleon's prestige.

It demanded retribution.

For a man who is forever accused of cynicism,

Napoleon was woefully trusting

and even gullible

when it came to the Tsar.

Take a close look at Napoleon's letters

and a trusting nature and fragility of character are soon revealed.

Napoleon was one of the most prodigious writers in history -

he wrote or dictated an average of some 15 letters or documents a day.

To his former wife Josephine,

Napoleon had written fawning, puppy-dog love letters.

To his staff, he poured out order after order after order.

But, at times, his correspondence betrays the acute sensitivities

of the man behind all the valour and bravado.

I love reading Napoleon's letters.

Here's a man who's capable of really expressing himself

and his deepest emotions, even his vulnerabilities.

He once wrote to a Chief of Staff saying that,

"There is no greater coward than I,"

when building his plan of campaign.

And it gave him almost a physical pain doing it.

And speaking to a confidante he said,

"France must accept me for my flaws.

"My greatest flaw is an inability to accept insults."

It was a devastatingly honest self-assessment.

In time, that sensitivity,

rendered more acute by the relentless aggression

of the European monarchs

and the social conservatism of the peoples of Europe,

would exact a devastating price.

In late 1811, humiliated by the Tsar,

Napoleon initiated a second military front.

As he later said of the Tsar's action and the Spanish campaign...

Two ulcers ate into France's vitals.

She could not bear them both at once.

We must extract peace. It is at Moscow.

Napoleon now initiated the largest single military operation

in history to date -

an invasion of Russia.

He amassed an imperial army of over 600,000 soldiers,

larger than the entire population of Paris.

A multi-national force

with almost half of the infantry born outside France.

Napoleon left for Russia from here, the Palace of Saint-Cloud.

He was well-prepared - diamonds had been sown into the lining

of his carriage in case of hurried flight.

The Tsar had reneged on his deal with Napoleon and the Emperor

had planned a massive but strategically limited campaign

to force him back into the fold. For the Emperor,

it was to become a life or death struggle for his empire.

From the outset, the campaign of 1812 was one of damnation.

In June, the Grande Armee crossed the border into Russia.

Unable to withstand such a huge force,

the Russian Army fell back.

The following month, battle was joined with the Russians in the west

but the enemy continued to withdraw,

sucking Napoleon further into the interior of the country.

The shocking thing was that, by that time, over 80,000 French soldiers

had already died, and tens of thousands more were too ill for duty

and Napoleon had lost almost a third of his central strike force.

The biggest killer was disease.

Typhus had been endemic in Russia for decades, and then exhaustion.

The army had misjudged the weather and debilitating heat.

Because of the immense length of supply lines,

soldiers were forced to live off the land, and starvation set in.

According to Karl von Suckow,

a lieutenant serving in the Wurttemberg Guard...

Hundreds killed themselves,

feeling unable to endure such hardship.

Every day one heard isolated shots

ring out in the woods near the road.

GUNSHOT

Napoleon pressed on,

claiming the continued retreat of the Russians as evidence of

"a degenerate nation who don't know how to make either war or peace."

The Grande Armee failed to outflank its enemy,

and whenever the Russians fought

it was dragged deeper and deeper into the country.

In August, Napoleon took Smolensk.

Originally, he'd planned to fortify the city

and spend the brutal Russian winter there.

But he changed his mind,

ignoring the advice of some of his most trusted marshals.

NAPOLEON: We have gone too far to turn back.

Peace is in front of us. We are but ten days' march from it,

so near the goal.

Let us march on Moscow!

Napoleon was desperate for the kind of decisive battle

that had won him victory in the past.

Having beaten the Russians twice before,

this invasion was born of a rational self-belief,

rather than conceited, imperialist hubris.

The problem with Napoleon in 1812 is not the things that go wrong

after he captured Smolensk, but the very fact that he ever got as far

as Smolensk in the first place.

Once it became clear that his three-week campaign concept

was not going to work,

and that his troops therefore WEREN'T going to have the food

necessary after those three weeks, he should have stopped where he was.

He feared humiliation.

The determination of the Russian people to fight the advancing French

was now attaining a near-mystical pitch,

their will as unbreakable as that of the Spaniards.

Finally, two months after the French Army had entered the country,

the Russian Army, under the command of Field Marshal Kutuzov,

decided to stop their scorched-earth withdrawal

and stand and fight.

A location was chosen at Borodino,

170 miles east of Smolensk.

The main French attack on the Russian Army

started at dawn on the 7th of September.

The Russians took a very strong defensive position -

their right behind the River Kalatsha,

their left at Borodino village,

and their centre at the large earthworks of the Great Redoubt.

Then Napoleon's imagination failed him.

Rather than seek to outflank his enemy,

he opted for a near-suicidal frontal assault

on the heavily defended Redoubt

and the two armies battered each other into exhaustion.

There was no finesse to Borodino, it was a vicious slogging match,

hand-to-hand with musket butts and bayonets.

Here, in the Great Redoubt,

warfare entered its modern phase,

with mass bombardments

and slaughter in trenches.

This did not play to Napoleon's strengths,

which were for strategic artistry and extravagant manoeuvres.

The world according to Napoleon was dying.

After two cavalry charges, the French held on to their gains.

However, in a second error

and despite entreaties once again from his marshals,

Napoleon refused to send in his Imperial Guard

to finish the Russians off.

He was cautious, hesitating to commit the flower of his army

over 170 miles away

from his closest base of operations.

During the night of the 7th of September, the Russians stole away.

The French were too exhausted to stop them.

Tens of thousands of men had already been lost in this campaign.

As an officer was once quoted as saying...

Any water to be found on the field

was so soaked with blood

that even the horses refused to drink it.

Napoleon defeated the Russians at Borodino,

but he didn't rout them, which he desperately needed to do.

He underestimated his enemy,

something that was to become a trait in the future,

but which had never happened in the battles of the past.

Having misjudged the Russians militarily at Borodino,

he was about to go on and to misjudge them politically,

here at the very heart of their empire,

75 miles to the east, in Moscow.

On September the 14th, Napoleon and the French approached Moscow.

At last! Napoleon said.

That famous city, it's about time!

Yet, in one of the starkest moments of 19th-century military history,

just when the Grande Armee entered Moscow,

home to a quarter of a million people,

just 15,000 remained there.

The Russians had abandoned the city,

their heroism testified to in a remarkable set of letters

held today in the Russian National Archives.

This is a letter from Tsar Alexander I

to Count Rostopchin, the Governor of Moscow,

and it's all about creating the defences of the militia of Moscow.

It was written four days after the fall of Smolensk

and it's quite clear that the Russian high command now knows

that Moscow is the next place that Napoleon is going to attack.

Rostopchin was quite a controversial figure in Russian history.

He was fantastically - fanatically - anti-French,

to the point that, in 1812, he actually burnt down his own chateau.

He went from room to room, setting fire to it

and then put up a sign that said:

"I have set fire to my chateau which cost me a million to build

"because I'm not going to have any dog of a Frenchman lodging in it."

This letter is also to Rostopchin,

this time from Barclay de Tolly, the great Russian general.

Here he writes, "It is with sorrow in my soul that I have to inform

"Your Highness that we are going not to fight for Moscow again

"but just to march the army through it and out the other side."

Now, "sorrow in my soul" is not something that Barclay de Tolly,

who was quite a dry-as-dust figure - he wasn't very prey to emotions.

He didn't write that easily,

but it was something that obviously

echoed the feelings of many Russians.

In Moscow, Napoleon's troubles escalated.

He took up residence in the Palace of the Kremlin

and sought a negotiated peace with the Tsar.

Alexander gave no answer.

A great fire engulfed the city and raged unchecked for three days,

started by Rostopchin and native Muscovites.

Food was running out in the city.

The Russian winter would soon be setting in.

Napoleon should have left Moscow at once but instead,

in yet another critical decision of the campaign,

he stayed for just over a month.

Then, on the 18th of October, he took a decision that would carry

enormous significance for his entire career.

He had still not won a clear victory against Russia

but ordered the French Army to retreat from Moscow.

He shouldn't have been there in the first place.

It was a signature of Napoleon's success throughout his career

that it was always the battle that mattered and not the capital.

Yet, in 1812, it was the capital

that he focused on and not the battle.

Was this a lust for conquest or his own personal vanity?

No, it was simply that standing in the Sparrow Hills

looking down on the golden, onion-domed Moscow,

he found capturing the city to be irresistible.

The retreat from Moscow presented Napoleon

with the most important decision of his life.

Within a week of leaving the city he had a choice of routes

back to Smolensk -

a bold southern route through warmer, unspoilt countryside,

but on which the Russian Army was camped,

a western route along unmapped roads,

or he could return the way he had come,

along the devastated road to Smolensk.

After an indecisive battle on the 24th of October,

Napoleon decided to take the northern route,

at least it had some food depots along that way.

The decision was wrong and disastrous.

What he didn't know was that the Russians

were retreating from the southern route.

The winter of 1812 was exceptionally cold,

minus-13 degrees during the day, minus-35 at night.

The food depots on the northern route were insufficiently stocked

and the countryside had already been stripped of food and fodder.

There was starvation, snow-blindness, frostbite.

Some French soldiers had to sleep inside disembowelled horses

to avoid the cold.

An officer in the Imperial Russian Army saw...

..corpses, from the thighs of which

strips of flesh had been cut for eating.

It looked like a caravan. A wandering nation.

Wrote an aide-de-camp of Napoleon.

It is impossible to express the grief of Napoleon.

His Chamberlain wrote. The extreme agitation of his mind.

Three weeks later, savaged by conditions

and attack from the Russians, the French finally arrived at Smolensk.

How would they escape from Russia,

and exit this hell of a campaign?

The question mattered since,

advancing to the Berezina River in modern-day Belarus,

the Grande Armee was now completely boxed in.

In the epic of Napoleon's invasion of Russia and route back home,

a story of immense human disaster

and serial catastrophes.

There is no more perilous moment for Napoleon than here at the Berezina.

144,000 Russians were converging on his army of 55,000 men.

He had a river to his back,

the only bridge over which had been destroyed by the Russians.

As Marshal Ney told a friend,

"If Napoleon succeeds in getting us out of this today,

"he's the very devil."

Napoleon's army appeared to be hopelessly caught.

In front of him, a fast-flowing, freezing cold river.

Behind him, a large enemy.

From the north, a second force of Russians was bearing down,

and from the south a third.

What followed has to be one of the greatest escapes

in all of military history.

The Russians who were along that bank of the river

suspected that the French were going to attempt a crossing

on this stretch of it.

So, in a classic deceptive manoeuvre,

Napoleon sent a force of 300 cuirassiers

right the way down south there.

They cut down trees and interviewed the locals and lit campfires -

all to distract the Russians.

But would it give Napoleon enough time and space to create an opening?

French staff officers could hardly believe their luck

when they saw the Russian cavalry patrols ride off southward

without so much as a glance over their shoulders.

The lure appeared to have worked.

The French identified an ideal site to bridge the river...

..but how would they cross?

400 Dutch sappers,

plunged up to their armpits in this freezing cold river,

and I mean freezing cold -

there were six-foot blocks of ice that were floating down it.

And some of them were swept away by the current and others of them

succumbed to hypothermia, even though you were only allowed

to go in the water for 15 minutes each.

But what the rest of them achieved was something that I think stands up

in the annals of military history

because it was a miracle of escape.

They managed to build two

300-foot long

and 12-foot wide bridges

and they did it in only three hours.

And it was across these that Napoleon's army escaped,

55,000 of them.

The story wasn't so happy for the 20,000 camp followers

and stragglers who were stuck on this side of the bank,

especially after the French Army set fire to the bridges at the end.

They were caught in complete pandemonium and panic

and when the Russian Army got here, they were massacred.

The campaign had seen a catalogue of mistakes.

Of the men in the central column that advanced on Moscow in 1812,

95% had either died or been captured.

By my calculation, almost two-thirds of the campaign force died

from causes other than military action.

Everything that had gone wrong was down to Napoleon,

yet he blamed the whole "frightful calamity",

as he described it in a proclamation to the French nation,

on "so cruel a season" - IE, the weather.

He argued that he had been defeated by savage nature,

rather than by his own poor judgment.

But on his return to Paris, the most phenomenal thing happened.

He not only survived the political fallout, he built another army.

Within two months of the retreat from Moscow,

Napoleon was back here at the Arc du Carrousel

and then he attended an exhibition of painting at the Louvre.

To all appearances, it was business as usual.

The sheer scale of the losses in Russia

would have felled most military leaders, but not Napoleon.

Within two months, he had built up an entirely new army of 350,000 men.

It was a testament to how much France still believed in him.

The root of Napoleon's power in France

Revolution had given them their land taken from monarchy, aristocracy

and Church, and the Emperor had protected their interests

at home and abroad.

Although conscription was deeply unpopular,

overall, they were still prepared to continue to supply their sons

to the cause of France and the glory of their Emperor.

As one of Napoleon's closest advisors said...

The entire nation overlooked Napoleon's reverses

and vied with one another in displaying zeal and devotion.

It was a personal triumph for the Emperor.

Things seemed to come into existence as if by magic.

Yet the anti-Revolutionary powers now saw Napoleon's weakness

and smelled blood.

A new alliance, this time of ALL the major powers in Europe,

now formed against him

and they advanced what they called a Holy War.

With battle lines drawn in North-West and Central Europe,

the French Army won some military successes against Russia and Prussia

in the spring of 1813.

But then, in a startling change of tactics,

the allied powers agreed amongst themselves

only to attack Napoleon's marshals

and then fall back when he himself was present.

The strategy worked.

By Autumn 1813, half a million men assembled to fight

the largest battle in European history thus far.

At the Battle of Leipzig in Germany, known as the "Battle of the Nations",

sheer weight of numbers forced Napoleon

to fight only the second defensive battle of his career.

He was defeated resoundingly

with the loss of no fewer than 33 generals.

When he quitted Leipzig... Recalled the King of Saxony's aide-de-camp.

..he was bathed in sweat from bodily exertion

and mental disturbance combined.

The Allies now carried out a relentless drive to invade France.

Napoleon faced 300,000 Russians,

Prussians and Austrians on the Rhine.

In the Campaign of France that followed,

the Grande Armee fought no fewer than 12 battles to save La Patrie.

With Napoleon in the field,

outright opposition formed in government and in Paris.

On the 31st March, 1814, Tsar Alexander I entered Paris

at the head of the Russian Army.

With enemy forces encamped in the fields of the Champs-Elysees,

Napoleon became the first French leader to lose Paris

to enemy occupation for almost 400 years.

With the capture of Paris,

Tsar Alexander I came to stay here, at the house of Talleyrand,

the political leader of the opposition to Napoleon in France.

So, this place became both the nerve centre

of the Allied occupation

and the political headquarters of the Russian Empire.

Coming here represented total victory for the Russians.

Not only had they avenged the invasion of 1812

but they had also deposed its leader

and they had eclipsed the power of the Napoleonic Empire.

Within just a year and a half,

Napoleon had paid the price of his disaster in Russia.

The energy of the 49-year-old leader was not in doubt.

In the 65-day long 1814 campaign alone,

Napoleon covered 1,000 miles on horseback

and slept in 48 different places.

In one five-day period,

he won four battles in a row.

However, as he himself said...

I am afraid to admit that I have waged war too much.

The fathers and sons of the French middle classes

were also no longer prepared to enlist for military service.

By 1814, France was utterly exhausted

and unwilling to heed the Emperor's call.

The economy was ruined after 22 years of war.

The cavalry had been decimated by the retreat from Moscow,

and men were unwilling to be conscripted into the army.

Napoleon was ready and willing to fight on after the fall of Paris.

His people weren't.

The day before the European powers occupied Paris,

Talleyrand, a former ally of Napoleon,

staged a coup against him

and set up a provisional government.

Within days, the entirely Napoleon-appointed Senate

deposed the Emperor and invited a Bourbon onto the throne.

On the 4th of April, at the Palace of Fontainebleau outside Paris,

Napoleon met his eight remaining marshals to consider their options.

Napoleon wanted to march on Paris

but his senior advisors, some of whom,

like Marshals Ney and Oudinot and MacDonald,

had been by his side from the early days of his career,

refused.

Napoleon could have precipitated a civil war.

But instead, he agreed to abdicate.

The Allies offered him the sovereignty of Elba,

an island in the Mediterranean.

On the 20th April, Napoleon departed for Elba.

Eight days earlier, he had attempted suicide,

but failed.

This staircase at Fontainebleau

saw the most emotional scene of the entire Napoleonic epic.

"Soldiers of my guard,"

Napoleon said to his troops on the 20th April, 1814,

"for 20 years, you have fought in the path of honour and glory.

"Farewell, my children.

"I should like to clasp each of you to my breast

"but instead I shall embrace your flag."

He then kissed the flag and got in to his carriage and left for Elba.

There wasn't a dry eye in the house.

Elba proved to be little more than gardening leave for Napoleon,

who remained, for many French people, their legitimate leader.

They feared the seizure of their property by the monarchy

and the Bourbons behaved with petty vindictiveness

in their ten months in power.

Which is why, on the 26th February, 1815,

Napoleon left Elba for France,

accompanied by only 650 men of his Imperial Guard.

He was greeted as a hero on his return.

The European powers declared him

"an enemy and disturber of the world" -

confirming him for many Frenchmen as a Revolutionary patriot.

And Napoleon marched on Paris.

On the 20th March, 1815,

Napoleon arrived at the Tuileries

and was carried up the stairs in triumph.

The Tricolor flew over the Palace once again

and slogans started appearing on the walls of the city.

"Down with the priests! Death to the Royalists!

"Bourbons to the scaffold!"

It was the great French novelist Honore de Balzac who said,

"Did ever a man before in history

"win a great empire simply by showing his hat."

Napoleon is always portrayed as a warmonger

and yet the British declared war against him in 1803,

the Austrians and Russians in 1805,

the Russians and Prussians in 1806,

and the Austrians again in 1809.

The campaigns of 1813 and 1814

were similarly initiated by the Allied powers.

And so it was inevitable that,

in response to Napoleon re-taking Paris in 1815,

the Allied powers would want to overthrow the "Corsican Ogre"

for a second time.

The Allies were set on vengeance,

while Napoleon was prepared to put the past behind him.

Of all that individuals have done or written

since the taking of Paris. Napoleon said.

I shall forever remain ignorant.

For Wellington, this was the opportunity to destroy

what he called "this disgusting and fraudulent tyranny of Bonaparte."

For Napoleon, it was also clear

that there was going to be a decisive battle.

"We shall emerge victorious", he said

"from this struggle of a great people against its oppressors."

By decree in March 1815, Napoleon scaled up the army.

He made it clear to the Allied powers that he wanted peace,

but it had no impact upon them.

He renounced all Imperial ideas.

Henceforth, the happiness and the consolidation of France

shall be the object of all my thoughts. He wrote.

At a huge political and military rally in Paris,

he braced France for the inevitable challenge.

NAPOLEON: Emperor, consul, soldier,

I owe everything to the people.

In prosperity, in adversity,

on the battlefield, in council,

enthroned, in exile,

France has been the sole and constant object

of my thoughts and actions.

Frenchmen, tell the citizens that we are at a great moment.

Napoleon determined to strike north into Belgium

at the only major Allied force within easy reach,

before they could be reinforced.

He sought to interpose the French Army

between the armies of Prussia and Britain

and then defeat them both in detail.

He dispatched one force under Marshal Ney

to engage the Anglo-Allied forces at Quatre Bras.

But they were able to make an orderly withdrawal

to a previously reconnoitred defensive position

on the ridge of Mont-Saint-Jean.

Meanwhile, Napoleon attacked the Prussians at Ligny,

some nine miles away.

The Prussians were defeated but able to re-organise.

"Disperse to manoeuvre, concentrate to fight."

That was a fundamental military maxim of Napoleon's warfare.

And yet here, on the battlefield of Ligny, he did the exact opposite.

Napoleon sent Marshal Grouchy off in that direction

with 30,000 men and 98 guns to try to find the Prussians.

He had no Council of War. He was given no advice.

All the people who could have given him strategic advice -

Lannes, Desaix - were dead.

Now there was no-one close at hand to tell him that he was wrong.

The Duke of Wellington later called it the most important decision

of the 19th century,

for Grouchy never found the Prussians till it was too late.

In a brilliantly counter-intuitive move, the Prussian Chief of Staff

took his forces northwards to stay in touch with the Anglo-Allied Army.

It meant that 50,000 Prussians were now free to join battle.

On the 18th of June, 1815, the day after a tumultuous thunderstorm,

the French and Anglo-Allied armies

were set to meet at Waterloo,

on one of the smallest battlefields that Napoleon had ever fought on -

a little over three miles across.

According to the Duke of Wellington, it would be "a battle of giants."

For Napoleon... The battle that is coming will save France

and will be remembered in the annals of the world.

I shall have my artillery fire and my cavalry charge.

Napoleon was marching up this road here

with a force of 72,000 men and 246 guns,

and he was going to try to break through Wellington's line,

which really stretched the whole way here, up through there.

And Wellington had 68,000 men and 157 guns.

Now, for Napoleon,

this was going to be a classic, central, massive thrust.

But what he didn't know was that on the morning of the battle,

Field Marshal Blucher, who was right over there in Wavre,

about nine miles away, had promised Wellington

that he was going to turn up with two army corps,

which was about two thirds of his entire force,

and he was going to smash in the French right flank.

For Napoleon, the terms of engagement

were about to change radically.

The battle started with a fight

developing at the Hougoumont farmhouse.

Napoleon's options for the kind of grand, sweeping,

outflanking manoeuvres that had won him so many battles in the past

were closed down by the dispositions Wellington made

and the topography off the ground.

The farmhouse here at La Haye Sainte saw the crisis moment of the battle.

It provided Napoleon with his last and best opportunity

for breaking Wellington's line.

So, he sent in his crack unit, the Imperial Guard,

on both sides of this farmhouse.

But it was a much depleted force because he'd had to send so many men

to fight off the Prussians on his right flank.

Throughout his career,

Napoleon had tried to outflank and envelop his enemy.

This time, his enemy was doing it to him.

The French Imperial Guard was used to administering the coup de grace

against a defeated enemy, but now Napoleon was forced to use it

as a last-ditch attempt to save the day.

This time they were simply unable to break through the enemy line.

Once the Guard were seen to be thrust back,

the French Army cried in shock "La garde recule!"

A cry that had not been heard on any battlefield

since the formation of the Guard.

And it was the sign for the general disintegration of the French Army

across the entire front.

At 8pm, the cry "Sauve qui peut!" went up.

"Save yourselves!"

And Napoleon took a comrade by the arm and said...

Come, General, the affair is over.

We've lost the day, let us be off.

It was here that the Imperial Guard made its last stand

at the Battle of Waterloo.

Napoleon came here, amidst the utter chaos

of a beaten and disintegrating army.

He stayed as long as he could until there was no hope,

and then he made his escape.

It was a catastrophic defeat.

And, unlike the retreat from Moscow,

it was an escape from which there could be no return.

One month after Waterloo, Napoleon surrendered to the British.

"Incomprehensible day," he later said of the battle.

"I sensed that fortune was abandoning me."

Many complex theories have been advanced for his downfall

but to my mind it's quite simple.

Napoleon had launched an economic war against Britain,

who had refused to make peace with him.

To enforce the blockade, he had invaded Portugal and Spain

which went wrong and badly weakened him.

He entered into an alliance with Russia

and had trusted Tsar Alexander.

But the Tsar had reneged on the deal.

To force Russia back into the fold, he invaded the country.

The campaign was a disaster.

The Napoleonic spell was over.

In early August 1815,

Napoleon left for exile on a remote volcanic island

in the Atlantic Ocean.

The British Government had dispatched him to a place

where he would never again be able to disturb the peace of Europe.

Napoleon sailed to Saint Helena humiliated.

But at least he hadn't been executed,

thanks to the decency of the British.

The voyage lasted ten weeks

and then he spent five and a half years on the island.

It would have broken most men.

But Napoleon, typically,

used the time to become history's greatest exile.

With supreme irony,

Napoleon was held prisoner here at Longwood House,

a place with all of the serene,

stultifying atmosphere of an English suburban villa.

It was to protect all of the gains of the French Revolution

that Napoleon had built - an empire of 45 million people.

He had enshrined the rights of the individual

and the family in the Code Napoleon.

He had fundamentally reformed a nation.

Yet, his rule was undone by just two acts of aggression

both designed to force Britain to the negotiating table.

Napoleon hated Saint Helena.

By 1821, he was thoroughly depressed and very ill.

Like the ancient Athenian politician Themistocles,

Napoleon "lived in the middle of the plains of Persia,

"ever missing his country."

Napoleon died here, in this very room.

There have been endless conspiracy theories about how he was poisoned,

but actually, when the seven doctors opened him up

at the postmortem, they found that he had rampant stomach cancer,

which was the disease that killed his father.

For me, what's much more interesting is why didn't he commit suicide?

He'd spoken about suicide, written about it,

he admired figures in history who committed suicide and he had

actually attempted to commit suicide himself, seven years earlier.

He hated living on what he called "this accursed rock".

He was terminally depressed and innately bored.

Why didn't he do it? For whatever reason,

he decided that he was going to let nature take its course.

That required a different kind of courage.

Napoleon was a man who gave birth to the modern.

He fiercely promoted meritocracy

and defended justice based upon reason, rather than feudal whim.

As a young man, he idolised history's great captains -

Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar.

By the time of his death,

he achieved the ambition he once conceived of as a schoolboy -

he had joined the Ancients.

After Napoleon, there was no turning back

from the days of feudal privilege, when an individual's worth

was judged on his parents' social status,

rather than the content of his character.

In the words of Sir Winston Churchill,

"the impetus of the French Revolution

"was spread by the genius of Napoleon.

"Ideals of liberty and nationalism

"were imparted to all the peoples."

It was a formidable and enduring legacy.

19 years after his death,

Napoleon's body was moved from Saint Helena to Paris.

He was interred on the anniversary

both of his coronation and the Battle of Austerlitz,

the two greatest moments of an extraordinary life.