Austria was already crowing over its triumph and all Europe was laughing because General Bonaparte had been “caught napping,” when one May morning Consul Napoleon and a great army came tobogganing down the mountain sides into the plains of Italy, as if they had fallen from the sky.
In a letter to his older brother, Napoleon wrote of this:
“We have dropped here like a thunderbolt; the enemy didn’t expect it, and hardly believe it yet.”
He had made his soldiers climb up the Alps Mountains in the highest, steepest place, dragging heavy cannon and army supplies after them. By his wonderful feat of crossing the Alps, Napoleon won by surprise the victory at Marengo, just as he had beaten the shepherd lads when he was a boy of eight.
The people now made their hero consul for life. After that it was easy for him to make himself Emperor of the French. At his coronation Napoleon snatched the crown out of the hands of the pope and placed it on his own head, to show that he was emperor by the right of his own might. Yet Emperor Napoleon kept on leading his armies in person. He still had to fight with other nations to hold his place as master of Europe. He gained even more brilliant victories, as Emperor Napoleon, than he had won as General Bonaparte. Not content with his record as a great conqueror, he gave the French people the Code Napoléon, a set of laws
