1799
Napoleon's Coup of 18 Brumaire
Returned secretly from Egypt (leaving his army behind), Napoleon conspired with Sieyes to topple the Directory. On 19 Brumaire, grenadiers stormed the council chamber at Saint-Cloud; Bonaparte emerged First Consul. A decade of revolution ended in a coup by its most promising general. The French Republic had a master. Within five years he would crown himself emperor, completing the cycle from popular sovereignty to personal rule.
Death of George Washington
Washington rode his Mount Vernon farms in December sleet, came home with a sore throat, and was dead two days later - bled by his doctors, as was the custom, into exhaustion. 'Tis well,' he said at the end. Congress adjourned; the nation put on crape; even his enemies acknowledged a rare departure: a leader who had let power go.
Rosetta Stone Discovered
French soldiers digging fortifications in the Nile Delta village of Rosetta uncovered a slab inscribed in three scripts - Greek, demotic, and hieroglyphic. Napoleon's savants recognized its value immediately. Within a generation, Champollion would use it to crack hieroglyphs and give ancient Egypt back its voice. The stone was seized by the British after the French surrender and placed in the British Museum, where it remains the most visited object.
Ranjit Singh Takes Lahore
The one-eyed Sikh chieftain - nineteen years old, covered in smallpox scars - rode into Lahore at the invitation of its citizens. Within a decade he would rule the Punjab and build the last great Sikh empire, a state that would hold the British Company at bay from the Khyber until his grandsons.
Alessandro Volta Builds His Pile
In Pavia, the Italian physicist stacked discs of zinc and silver separated by brine-soaked cloth and drew a steady current - the first battery. He would announce it formally to London in 1800. Galvani had shown electricity twitching frog legs; Volta made it flow. Electricity was about to leave the lecture hall and enter the laboratory.
Tipu Sultan Dies at Seringapatam
The Tiger of Mysore, who had fought four wars against the British and cultivated French alliances, fell in the breach of his own capital, sword in hand. The Company army looted his palace and found his mechanical tiger mauling a European soldier - now in London's V&A. Mysore passed to British suzerainty.
Second Coalition Defeats French at Novi
The Russian general Suvorov, pressing down from the Alps, destroyed a French army at Novi in northern Italy. Most of Napoleon's Italian conquests were lost within a season. It was news of these disasters that drew Napoleon home from Egypt to make himself First Consul. Suvorov would die of exhaustion the next year.