On the 27th of July, of the
year 1794 (the 9th Thermidor of the year II, according to the
strange chronology of the revolution), the reign of Terror came
to an end, and all Paris danced with joy.
The dangerous position of France, however, made it necessary
that the government remain in the hands of a few strong
men, until the many enemies of the revolution should have been
driven from the soil of the French fatherland. While the
half-clad and half-starved revolutionary armies fought their
desperate battles of the Rhine and Italy and Belgium and
Egypt, and defeated every one of the enemies of the Great
Revolution, five Directors were appointed, and they ruled
France for four years. Then the power was vested in the hands
of a successful general by the name of Napoleon Bonaparte,
who became ``First Consul'' of France in the year 1799. And
during the next fifteen years, the old European continent became
the laboratory of a number of political experiments, the
like of which the world had never seen before.
NAPOLEON
NAPOLEON
NAPOLEON was born in the year 1769, the third son
of Carlo Maria Buonaparte, an honest notary public of
the city of Ajaccio in the island of Corsica, and his good
wife, Letizia Ramolino. He therefore was not a Frenchman,
but an Italian whose native island (an old Greek, Carthaginian
and Roman colony in the Mediterranean Sea) had
for years been struggling to regain its independence,
first of all from the Genoese, and after the middle of the
eighteenth century from the French, who had kindly offered
to help the Corsicans in their struggle for freedom and had
then occupied the island for their own benefit.
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