Napoleon I in the context of Vendôme Column

The Charter of 1815, signed on 22 April 1815, was the French constitution prepared by Benjamin Constant at the request of Napoleon I when he returned from exile on Elba. Officially named the Additional Act to the Constitutions of the Empire, the document extensively amended (in fact virtually replacing) the previous Napoleonic Constitutions (Constitution of the Year VIII, Constitution of the Year X and Constitution of the Year XII). The Additional Act reframed the Napoleonic constitution into something more along the lines of the Bourbon Restoration's Charter of 1814 of Louis XVIII, while otherwise ignoring the Bourbon charter's existence. It was very liberal in spirit, and gave the French people rights which had previously been unknown to them, such as the right to elect the mayor in communes of less than 5,000 in population. Napoleon treated it as a mere continuation of the previous constitutions, and it therefore took the form of an ordinary legislative act "additional to the constitutions of the Empire".

Napoleon III (born Charles-Louis Napoléon Bonaparte; 20 April 1808 – 9 January 1873) was President of France from 1848 to 1852 and then Emperor of the French from 1852 until his deposition in 1870. He was the first president, second emperor, and last monarch of France.

Napoleon III was born at the height of the First French Empire in the Tuileries Palace in Paris, the son of Louis Bonaparte, King of Holland (r. 1806–1810), and Hortense de Beauharnais, and paternal nephew of the reigning Emperor Napoleon I. It would only be two months following his birth that he, in accordance with Napoleon I's dynastic naming policy, would be bestowed the name of Charles-Louis Napoleon, however, shortly thereafter, Charles was removed from his name. Louis Napoleon Bonaparte was the first and only president of the French Second Republic, elected in 1848. He seized power by force in 1851 when he could not constitutionally be re-elected. He later proclaimed himself Emperor of the French and founded the Second Empire, reigning until the defeat of the French Army and his capture by Prussia and its allies at the Battle of Sedan in 1870.

The War of the Third Coalition (French: Guerre de la Troisième Coalition) was a European conflict lasting from 1805 to 1806 and was the first conflict of the Napoleonic Wars. During the war, France and its client states under Napoleon I and its ally Spain opposed an alliance, the Third Coalition, which was made up of the United Kingdom, the Austrian Empire, the Russian Empire, Naples, Sicily, and Sweden. Prussia remained neutral during the war.

Britain had already been at war with France following the breakdown of the Peace of Amiens and remained the only country still at war with France after the Treaty of Pressburg. From 1803 to 1805, Britain was under constant threat of a French invasion. The Royal Navy, however, assured its naval dominance at the Battle of Trafalgar in October 1805.

The Battle of Friedland (14 June 1807) was a major engagement of the Napoleonic Wars between the armies of the French Empire and the Russian Empire led by Napoleon I and General Levin August von Bennigsen respectively. Napoleon and the French obtained a decisive victory that routed much of the Russian army, which retreated chaotically over the Alle river by the end of the fighting. The battlefield is located in modern-day Kaliningrad Oblast, near the town of Pravdinsk, Russia.

The engagement at Friedland was a strategic necessity after the Battle of Eylau earlier in 1807 had failed to yield a decisive verdict for either side. The battle began when Bennigsen noticed the seemingly isolated reserve corps of Marshal Lannes at the town of Friedland. Bennigsen, who planned only to secure his march northward to Wehlau and never intended to risk an engagement against Napoleon's numerically-superior forces, thought he had a good chance of destroying these isolated French units before Napoleon could save them, and ordered his entire army over the Alle River. Lannes skillfully held his ground against determined Russian attacks until Napoleon could bring additional forces onto the field. Bennigsen could have recalled the Russian forces, numbering about 50,000–60,000 men on the opposite bank of the river, and retreated across the river before the arrival of Napoleon's entire army but, being in poor health, decided to stay at Friedland and took no measures to protect his exposed and exhausted army. By late afternoon, the French had amassed a force of 80,000 troops close to the battlefield. Relying on superior numbers and the vulnerability of the Russians with their backs to the river, Napoleon concluded that the moment had come and ordered a massive assault against the Russian left flank. The sustained French attack pushed back the Russian army and pressed them against the river behind. Unable to withstand the pressure, the Russians broke and started escaping across the Alle, where an unknown number of them died from drowning. The Russian army suffered horrific casualties at Friedland – losing over 40% of its soldiers on the battlefield.

The Battle of Smolensk was the first major battle of the French invasion of Russia. It took place on 16–18 August 1812 and involved about 45,000 men of the Grande Armée under Emperor Napoleon I against about 30,000 Russian troops under General Barclay de Tolly. Napoleon occupied Smolensk by driving out Prince Pyotr Bagration's Second Army. The French artillery bombardment burned the city to the ground. Of 2,250 buildings, 84% were destroyed with only 350 surviving intact. Of the city's 15,000 inhabitants, about 1,000 were left at the end of the battle inside the smoking ruins. With over 15,000 casualties, it was one of the bloodiest battles of the invasion.

The Territory of Missouri was an organized incorporated territory of the United States that existed from June 4, 1812, until August 10, 1821. In 1819, the Territory of Arkansas was created from a portion of its southern area. In 1821, a southeastern portion of the territory was admitted to the Union as the State of Missouri, and the rest became unorganized territory for several years.

The Left Bank of the Rhine (German: Linkes Rheinufer, French: Rive gauche du Rhin) was the region north of Lauterbourg that is now in western Germany and was conquered during the War of the First Coalition and annexed by the First French Republic.

After the French attempt to create a Cisrhenian Republic had foundered, the territories west of the Rhine were reorganised into several French Departments. After the allied victory over Napoleon I in 1814, the territories were temporarily administered by the Central Administrative Departement (Zentralverwaltungsdepartement). The Sarre province and the district of Landau in der Pfalz, which had been French before the Napoleonic Wars, became by the final act of the Congress of Vienna ceded to the members of the anti-Napoleonic coalition. The annexations done under the First Republic were undone. From those territories, the Bavarian Circle of the Rhine (Rheinkreis) and the Hessian province of Rhenish Hesse (Rheinhessen) were formed in 1816.

The École normale supérieure – PSL (French pronunciation: [ekɔl nɔʁmal sypeʁjœʁ]; also known as ENS, Normale sup', Ulm or ENS Paris) is a grande école in Paris, France. It is one of the constituent members of Paris Sciences et Lettres University (PSL). Due to its selectivity, historical role, and influence within French society, the ENS is generally considered the most prestigious of the grandes écoles, as well as one of the most prestigious higher education institutions in France. Its pupils are generally referred to as normaliens, while its alumni are sometimes referred to as archicubes.

The school was founded in 1794 during the French Revolution, to provide homogeneous training of high-school teachers in France, but it later closed. The school was subsequently reestablished by Napoleon I as pensionnat normal from 1808 to 1822, before being recreated in 1826 and taking the name École normale in 1830. When other institutes called écoles normales were created in 1845, the word supérieure (meaning upper) was added to form the current name. In 1936, the institution started providing university-level education.

Jean Duplessis-Bertaux (1747–1819) was a French painter, draughtsman and producer of etchings and burin engravings. He signed himself Duplessi-Bertaux., Jean Duplessi-Bertaux, Duplessis-Bertaux or JD Bertaux. Some of his prints are attributed to Duplessis Berthault – however, this probably refers to Duplessis and his engraver (Pierre-Gabriel) Berthault. Prints at that time always bore the names of both the draughtsman and the engraver but in these cases two names were probably mistranscribed as one by a past cataloguer.

He produced prints of Scènes de la Révolution (he had taken part in the French Revolution himself), the Cris de Paris (Street Cries of Paris) and the Campagnes de Napoléon (illustrating Bonaparte's Italian campaigns, after paintings by Carle Vernet). He also collaborated on some prints with Jean-Louis Delignon, who sometimes completed unfinished work by Duplessis-Bertraux, and also produced a number of pornographic prints (sometimes unsigned and only later re-attributed to him).

The Empire style (French: style Empire [stil ɑ̃piʁ]) is an early–19th-century design movement in architecture, furniture, other decorative arts, and the visual arts, representing the second phase of Neoclassicism. It flourished between 1799 and 1815 during the Consulate and the First French Empire periods, although its life span lasted until the late-1820s. From France it spread into much of Europe and the United States.

The Empire style originated in and takes its name from the rule of the Emperor Napoleon I in the First French Empire, when it was intended to idealize Napoleon's leadership and the French state. The previous fashionable style in France had been the Directoire style, a more austere and minimalist form of Neoclassicism that replaced the Louis XVI style, and the new Empire style brought a full return to ostentatious richness. The style corresponds somewhat to the Biedermeier style in the German-speaking lands, Federal style in the United States, and the Regency style in Britain.

École polytechnique (French pronunciation: [ekɔl pɔlitɛknik], lit. 'Polytechnic School'; also known as Polytechnique or l'X [liks]) is a grande école located in Palaiseau, France. It specializes in science and engineering and is a founding member of the Polytechnic Institute of Paris.

The school was founded in 1794 by mathematician Gaspard Monge during the French Revolution and was militarized under Napoleon I in 1804. It is still supervised by the French Ministry of Armed Forces. Originally located in the Latin Quarter in central Paris, the institution moved to Palaiseau in 1976, in the Paris-Saclay technology cluster.

Frankfurt was a major city of the Holy Roman Empire, being the seat of imperial elections since 885 and the city for imperial coronations from 1562 (previously in Free Imperial City of Aachen) until 1792. Frankfurt was declared an Imperial Free City (Freie und Reichsstadt) in 1372, making the city an entity of Imperial immediacy, meaning immediately subordinate to the Holy Roman Emperor and not to a regional ruler or a local nobleman.

Due to its imperial significance, Frankfurt survived mediatisation in 1803. Following the collapse of the Holy Roman Empire in 1806, Frankfurt fell to the rule of Napoleon I, who granted the city to Karl Theodor Anton Maria von Dalberg; the city became known as the Principality of Frankfurt. The Catholic cleric Dalberg emancipated Catholics living with the city boundary. In 1810 Dalberg merged Frankfurt with the Principality of Aschaffenburg, the County of Wetzlar, Fulda, and Hanau to form the Grand Duchy of Frankfurt. After the defeat of Napoleon and the collapse of the Confederation of the Rhine, Frankfurt was returned to its pre-Napoleonic constitution via the Congress of Vienna of 1815 and became a sovereign city-state and a member of the German Confederation.

The Place Vendôme (French: [plas vɑ̃dom]; lit. 'Vendôme Square'), originally the Place Louis-le-Grand ('Louis the Great Square'), and later the Place Internationale ('International Square'), is a public square in the 1st arrondissement of Paris, located to the north of the Tuileries Gardens and east of the Église de la Madeleine. It is the starting point of the Rue de la Paix. Its regular architecture by Jules Hardouin-Mansart and pedimented screens canted across the corners give the rectangular Place Vendôme the aspect of an octagon. The original Vendôme Column at the centre of the square was erected by Napoleon I to commemorate the Battle of Austerlitz; it was torn down on 16 May 1871, by decree of the Paris Commune, but subsequently re-erected and remains a prominent feature on the square today.

Napoleon II (Napoléon François Joseph Charles Bonaparte; 20 March 1811 – 22 July 1832) was the disputed Emperor of the French for 2 days in 1815. He was the son of Emperor Napoleon I and Empress Marie Louise, daughter of Emperor Francis I of Austria.

Napoleon II had been Prince Imperial of France and King of Rome since birth. After the fall of his father, he lived the rest of his life in Vienna and was known in the Austrian court as Franz, Duke of Reichstadt for his adult life (from the German version of his second given name, along with a title his grandfather granted him in 1818). He was posthumously given the nickname L'Aiglon ("the Eaglet").

Corps (/kɔːr/; plural corps /kɔːrz/; from French corps, from the Latin corpus "body") is a term used for several different kinds of organization. A military innovation by Napoleon I, the formation was formally introduced March 1, 1800, when Napoleon ordered General Jean Victor Marie Moreau to divide his command into four corps. Before it came into force in 1800, the idea of corps was already in its infancy (for example, Jourdan's Army of Sambre and Meuse in 1795 was divided into 3 corps), but it could not take a definite form due to the relatively small size of the individual armies. Only Moreau granted the corps legal status in 1800; Napoleon finally developed them in 1805. The size of a corps varies greatly, but two to five divisions and anywhere from 40,000 to 80,000 are the numbers stated by the US Department of Defense.

Within military terminology a corps may be:

The Palais des Beaux-Arts de Lille (Lille Palace of Fine Arts) is a municipal museum dedicated to fine arts, modern art, and antiquities located in Lille. It is one of the largest art museums in France.

It was one of the first museums built in France, established under the instructions of Napoleon I at the beginning of the 19th century as part of the popularisation of art. Jean-Antoine Chaptal's decree of 1801 selected fifteen French cities (among them Lille) to receive the works seized from churches and from the European territories occupied by the armies of Revolutionary France. The painters Louis Joseph Watteau and François-Louis-Joseph Watteau, known as the "Watteau of Lille", were heavily involved in the museum's beginnings - Louis Joseph Watteau made in 1795 the first inventory of the paintings confiscated during the Revolution, whilst his son François was deputy curator of the museum from 1808 to 1823.

The Cult of Reason (French: Culte de la Raison) was France's first established state-sponsored atheistic religion, intended as a replacement for Christianity during the French Revolution. After holding sway for barely a year, in 1794 it was officially replaced by the rival deistic Cult of the Supreme Being, promoted by Robespierre. Both cults were officially banned in 1802 by Napoleon Bonaparte with his Law on Cults of 18 Germinal, Year X.