Napoleon's empire kept calling itself the French Republic for four years
Napoleon was proclaimed Emperor of the French in May 1804 and crowned that December in Notre-Dame. Yet official documents went on describing the state as the French Republic until October 1808. The empire it named would dominate continental Europe, then vanish within a decade, briefly reviving for a hundred-odd days in 1815.
The road there began with a coup. On 9 November 1799 the Director Emmanuel Sieyes enlisted Bonaparte to overthrow the constitution, expecting to run the new government himself. Instead Bonaparte drafted the next constitution and made himself First Consul. In 1802 a plebiscite approved his consulship for life by 3,653,600 votes to 8,272, and on 18 May 1804 the Senate granted the imperial title. At the coronation Pope Pius VII consecrated him, and the regime consciously borrowed the imagery of imperial Rome and of Charlemagne.
Military success made the claim real. The army gathered at Boulogne to invade Britain was redirected after the naval defeat at Trafalgar and, as the Grande Armee, crushed Austria and Russia at Austerlitz in 1805. Napoleon then reorganised southern Germany into the Confederation of the Rhine, and on 6 August 1806 the Habsburgs gave up the title of Holy Roman Emperor rather than see him claim it, ending an institution more than a thousand years old. Victories at Jena-Auerstedt and Friedland followed, and the Treaties of Tilsit stripped Prussia of about half its territory, capped its army at 40,000 men and imposed an indemnity of 100,000,000 francs; Talleyrand, who had urged milder terms, began drifting away.
Family became policy. Joseph Bonaparte took the throne of Naples and later Spain, Louis became King of Holland, Jerome King of Westphalia, and Eugene de Beauharnais viceroy of Italy. At its peak in 1812 the empire counted 130 departments and more than 44 million people, and ruled some 90 million subjects across Europe. It also exported revolutionary reforms: the Napoleonic Code spread legal equality, jury trials and legal divorce, while seigneurial dues and aristocratic privilege were abolished almost everywhere it reached.
The 1812 invasion of Russia destroyed most of the army. Despite a string of victories in early 1814, Napoleon was beaten that April, and the empire formally ended on 6 April 1814. It returned on 20 March 1815 and fell for good on 7 July after Waterloo, with Napoleon sent to Saint Helena and the Bourbons restored. Historians call it the First Empire to separate it from the Second Empire of his nephew Napoleon III, from 1852 to 1870.
Source: First French Empire
