Napoleon

Napoleon Bonaparte rose from minor Corsican nobility through the French Revolution to become First Consul and then Emperor of the French, and one of the most studied military commanders in history. His reforms reshaped law and government across Europe, yet the same ambition drove the Napoleonic Wars, in which between three and six million soldiers and civilians died. That toll must be named plainly. Victories at Austerlitz, Jena and Friedland were followed by the catastrophe of the 1812 Russian campaign, defeat at Leipzig, exile to Elba, a brief return, and final defeat at Waterloo in 1815; he died in exile on Saint Helena in 1821. Read analytically, his chart carries a Sun in Leo at the very top, in the tenth house of career and public power, the placement of the throne, of relentless ambition and a hunger to be seen and followed. His Moon in Capricorn is the cold, Saturnian, duty-bound emotional nature, the child forged into stoic hardness, detached and driven. Libra ascends as a diplomat's mask. These signatures describe temperament and disposition; they explain nothing and excuse nothing. The wars he chose, and the millions who died in them, were his decisions, not his stars.