Napoleon: notorious military dictator of France and the last Holy Roman Emperor.
His quest was towards peasant liberation and his means through military might. Napoleon's rise to power came on the heels of the French Revolution whose proclamation was the destruction of the monarchy and the noble class and the elevation of "reason" and individual freedoms. Through his military exploits and his ruthless efficiency, Napoleon rose from obscurity to become Napoleon I, Emperor of France. Napoleon was one of the greatest military commanders in history. He has also been portrayed as a power hungry conqueror, although Napoleon denied being such a conqueror. He argued that, instead, he had attempted to build a federation of free people in a Europe united under a liberal government. But if this was his goal he intended to arrive there by taking power into his own hands. In the states he created, Napoleon granted constitutions, introduced law codes, abolished feudalism, created efficient governments and fostered education, science, literature and the arts.	Napoleon Bonaparte
Napoleon was a superb civil administrator. One of his greatest accomplishments was his supervision of the revision and collection of French law into codes. The new law codes incorporated some of the freedoms gained by the French people during the revolution, including religious tolerance and the abolition of serfdom. The most famous of the codes, the "Code Napoleon" or "Code Civil," is still the foundation for French civil law. Napoleon was most of all a pragmatist, willing to adapt "what worked", whether it was borrowed from the Revolution or from the old French regime. "We have finished the romance of the Revolution, we must now begin its history, only seeking for what is real and practicable in the application of its principles, and not what is speculative and hypothetical." -Napoleon (soon after he came to power) Napoleon promoted equality before the law and managed to re- establish Roman Catholicism as the primary religion of France, although Protestantism and Judaism were tolerated. He took these policies with him as he conquered west across Europe and into parts of Russia though it was here that the Russian winter halted his advance. Throughout his life, Napoleon found himself in positions to evoke change for the people, but with the necessity of gaining more power to do it. While he seized military power of France in 1799, it was not until 1804 that he declared himself Emperor of the French under the threat of a royalist plot against his government. In 1802 he is quoted as saying: "I govern not as a general but because the nation believes that I have the civilian qualities necessary to govern. If I did not have this opinion, the government could not stand." A ruthless intellectual mind capable of handling the most extreme of situations combined with his persistent quest for social reform (or betterment) and his adaptive pragmatism (not to mention his notorious temper) lead us to profile Napoleon as Extremist/Visionary/Realist with Working Visionary as Profile Boss. Though he was eventually defeated in 1815 and cast away on a small island for the rest of his life, no one can overestimate the effect that Napoleon had on all of European history and culture. He was the missionary of the French Revolution and the terror of governmental powers. Sidenote: "The widespread notion of Napoleon's shortness lies in the inaccurate translation of old French feet ("pieds de roi") to English. The French measure of five foot two (5' 2"), recorded at his autopsy, actually translates into five feet six and one half inches (5' 6.5") in English measure, which was about the average height of the Frenchman of his day. It's also probable that the grenadiers of his Imperial Guard, with whom he "hung out," were very tall men, therefore creating the illusion that Napoleon was very short."

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