The plot included Bonaparte's brother Lucien, then serving as speaker of the Council of Five Hundred, Roger Ducos, another Director, and Charles Maurice de Talleyrand.

On 9 November 1799 (18 Brumaire VIII under the French Republican Calendar) and the following day, troops led by Napoleon Bonaparte seized control.

He gradually extended his authority in Italy by annexing the Piedmont and by acquiring Genoa, Parma, Tuscany, and Naples, and added this Italian territory to the Cisalpine Republic.

When he recognised his error of raising the authority of the Pope from that of a figurehead, Napoleon produced the Articles Organiques (1802) with the goal of becoming the legal protector of the papacy, like Charlemagne.

To conceal his plans before their actual execution, he aroused French colonial aspirations against Britain and the memory of the 1763 Treaty of Paris, exacerbating British envy of France, whose borders now extended to the Rhine and beyond, to Hanover, Hamburg, and Cuxhaven.

William Pitt the Younger, back in power over Britain, appealed once more for an Anglo-Austro-Russian coalition against Napoleon to stop the ideals of revolutionary France from spreading.

Though the vague plan for an invasion of Great Britain was never executed, the Ulm campaign and the Battle of Austerlitz overshadowed the defeat at Trafalgar, and the camp of Boulogne put at Napoleon's disposal the best military resources he had commanded, in the form of La Grande Armée.

In the War of the Third Coalition, Napoleon swept away the remnants of the old Holy Roman Empire and created in southern Germany the vassal states of Bavaria, Baden, Württemberg, Hesse-Darmstadt, and Saxony, which were reorganised into the Confederation of the Rhine.

The Treaty of Pressburg, signed on 26 December 1805, extracted extensive territorial concessions from Austria, on top of a large financial indemnity.

Napoleon's creation of the Kingdom of Italy, the occupation of Ancona, and his annexation of Venetia and its former Adriatic territories marked a new stage in the French Empire's progress.

Older brother Joseph Bonaparte replaced the dispossessed Bourbons in Naples; younger brother Louis Bonaparte was installed on the throne of the Kingdom of Holland, formed from the Batavian Republic; brother-in-law Marshal Joachim Murat became Grand-Duke of Berg; youngest brother Jérôme Bonaparte was made son-in-law to the King of Württemberg and King of Westphalia; adopted son Eugène de Beauharnais was appointed Viceroy of Italy; and adopted daughter and second cousin Stéphanie de Beauharnais married Karl (Charles), the son of the Grand Duke of Baden.

To this, combined with growing tensions in Germany over French hegemony, Prussia responded by forming an alliance with Russia and sending troops into Bavaria on 1 October 1806.

Successive victories at Eylau and Friedland against the Russians finally ruined Frederick the Great's formerly mighty kingdom, obliging Russia and Prussia to make peace with France at Tilsit.

The Treaties of Tilsit ended the war between Russia and France and began an alliance between the two empires that held as much power as the rest of Europe.

The treaty removed about half of Prussia's territory: Cottbus was given to Saxony, the left bank of the Elbe was awarded to the newly created Kingdom of Westphalia, Białystok was given to Russia, and the rest of the Polish lands in Prussian possession were set up as the Duchy of Warsaw.

To the coalition of the northern powers, he added the league of the Baltic and Mediterranean ports, and to the bombardment of Copenhagen by the Royal Navy he responded with a second decree of blockade, dated from Milan on 17 December 1807.

After the Dos de Mayo riots and subsequent reprisals, the Spanish government began an effective guerrilla campaign, under the oversight of local Juntas.

The Iberian Peninsula became a war zone from the Pyrenees to the Straits of Gibraltar and saw the Grande Armée facing the remnants of the Spanish Army, as well as British and Portuguese forces.

At Aspern, Napoleon suffered his first serious tactical defeat, along with the death of Marshal Jean Lannes, an able commander and dear friend of the emperor.

Between 1810 and 1812 Napoleon's divorce of Joséphine, and his marriage with Archduchess Marie Louise of Austria, followed by the birth of his son, shed light upon his future policy.

He gradually withdrew power from his siblings and concentrated his affection and ambition on his son, the guarantee of the continuance of his dynasty, marking the high point of the Empire.

Caroline Bonaparte conspired against her brother and against her husband Murat; the hypochondriac Louis, now Dutch in his sympathies, found the supervision of the blockade taken from him, and also the defence of the Scheldt, which he had refused to ensure.

Amidst profound silence from the press and the assemblies, a protest was raised against imperial power by the literary world, against the excommunicated sovereign by Catholicism, and against the author of the Continental Blockade by the discontented bourgeoisie, ruined by the crisis of 1811[citation needed].

His Six Days' Campaign, which took place at the very end of the War of the Sixth Coalition, is often regarded as his greatest display of leadership and military prowess.

Pushed back, as he had been in Spain, from bastion to bastion, after the crossing of the Berezina, Napoleon had to fall back upon the frontiers of 1809, and then—having refused the peace offered to him by Austria at the Congress of Prague (4 June – 10 August 1813), from fear of losing Italy, where each of his victories had marked a stage in the accomplishment of his dream—on those of 1805, despite the victories at Lützen and Bautzen, and on those of 1802 after his disastrous defeat at Leipzig, when Bernadotte—now Crown Prince of Sweden—turned upon him, General Jean Moreau also joined the Allies, and longstanding allied states, such as Saxony and Bavaria, forsook him as well.

After the Hundred Days, the Bourbon monarchy was restored, with Louis XVIII regaining the French throne, while the rest of Napoleon's conquests were disposed of in the Congress of Vienna.