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6 August 1806, at Vienna

On 6 August 1806, Francis II issued a declaration at Vienna stating that the bonds connecting him to the German imperial body politic were dissolved and that the office and rank of imperial head had terminated. Johann Philipp von Stadion's name appears on it with his.

He laid down the imperial crown and government and released the electors, princes, estates, imperial judges and other imperial servants from their constitutional duties to him. The decree reached down to the civil service, not just the throne.

The reason the document gives

The declaration cited the Peace of Pressburg and, decisively, the 12 July agreement by leading imperial estates to separate and form the Confederation of the Rhine. A French ultimatum accompanied the crisis.

Its stated logic was conditional: the crown retained value only while its wearer could fulfil the trust placed in him by the imperial estates. Heading off a possible imperial election for Napoleon is one scholarly explanation for the act, but it is not the reason Francis gave.

One crown down, one kept

Francis released his German provinces and imperial lands from their imperial obligations, saying they would be administered as part of the Austrian body politic. He went on reigning under the hereditary Austrian imperial title he had assumed in 1804.

What historians still argue about is the second half of the document. Whether an emperor held unilateral constitutional authority to dissolve the whole Empire and release every estate — rather than simply abdicate — is more contested than the abdication itself.

16 October 1813: attacked on three fronts

Coalition forces attacked Napoleon's positions around Leipzig on 16 October 1813 from three directions: Blücher against Marmont near Möckern in the north, Gyulai toward Lindenau in the west, and Schwarzenberg's Army of Bohemia around Wachau, Markkleeberg and Liebertwolkwitz in the south.

Napoleon had about 178,000 men around the city, roughly 120,000 of them intended for his own southern attack. South of Leipzig, just under 140,000 French faced just under 127,000 Coalition troops.

The breakthrough that did not come

Napoleon counterattacked south of Leipzig after recovering Wachau. His central assault and Macdonald's attempted turning movement gained ground without breaking the Coalition line; French cuirassiers pushed far enough forward to threaten Tsar Alexander I and King Frederick William III before Cossacks and Russian cuirassiers drove them back.

The north undid the south. At Möckern, Blücher forced Marmont back toward Leipzig, depriving Napoleon of troops he had expected to use in his principal attack.

A draw, then the arithmetic of reinforcement

Estimated first-day losses run to about 20,000–25,000 French and about 30,000 Coalition, figures the source itself describes as difficult to disentangle. The Coalition held the field.

It also held the future. Roughly 140,000 more men were expected from Bernadotte and Bennigsen, against about 14,000 Napoleon could look for. The decisive Coalition advance came on 18 October, and Leipzig fell on the 19th.

11 April 1814, at a house in Paris

At about 11:30 a.m. on 11 April 1814, Napoleon's plenipotentiaries — Caulaincourt, Ney and Macdonald — signed the convention traditionally called the Treaty of Fontainebleau with Metternich for Austria, Nesselrode for Russia and Hardenberg for Prussia, at Talleyrand's Paris residence.

Napoleon was not among them. He was at Fontainebleau, which gave the treaty its conventional name, and ratified the agreement on 13 April.

Article I, and everything it did not take away

Article I made Napoleon renounce sovereignty over the French Empire, the Kingdom of Italy and every other country, for himself and for his family.

He was not reduced to a private citizen. He and Marie-Louise kept their imperial titles for life; Elba became a separate principality held by Napoleon in sovereignty and in property; and Parma, Piacenza and Guastalla were assigned to Marie-Louise and her direct descendants.

The price list of an exile

The treaty specified pensions, escorts, transport and a guard. Napoleon was promised 2,000,000 francs a year from French state revenue, half reversible to Marie-Louise, with 2,500,000 francs in total reserved for other members of the Bonaparte family.

He could retain 400 willing officers, non-commissioned officers and soldiers as a personal guard, while an escort of 1,200 to 1,500 Imperial Guard troops would go with him only as far as his embarkation point. He left Fontainebleau on 20 April and landed at Portoferraio on 4 May.

1 November 1814, by convention

The Deutsches Historisches Museum dates the Congress's official opening, under Austrian foreign minister Klemens von Metternich, to 1 November 1814 — after representatives had already been gathering and negotiating in Vienna since September.

The accounts disagree about what, if anything, opened. A scholarly organisational study finds that there was no ceremonial or plenary opening and treats 1 November as the conventional date on which the diplomats' formal committee work began. Britannica records instead that the proposed formal opening was postponed again after the Eight met on 30 October, and Webster's documentary collection states that the full congress of plenipotentiaries never came into existence.

A bureaucratic start to remaking Europe

What is documented for the day itself is a declaration by the Committee of Eight, announcing that a three-member committee would begin verifying delegates' credentials on 3 November and that procedural proposals would follow.

The obstruction was the constitution of the Congress. The Four — Austria, Britain, Prussia and Russia — meant to keep the principal territorial decisions in their own hands, while Talleyrand argued they had no legal authority to dispose of other states' sovereignty and demanded a properly constituted directing body. With no agreed procedure, the opening slipped again.

Who was actually deciding

About 200 states, provinces and cities were represented in a city of roughly 265,000 residents that absorbed some 30,000 additional visitors, and almost none of them were near the decisions: business ran through the Eight, smaller great-power meetings and specialised commissions rather than an assembly of all delegates voting together.

Through the postponement the Four carried on discussing the main territorial questions informally, the Eight assumed formal direction, and committees took up German and Swiss affairs. Talleyrand's procedural objection eventually worked, but not on this date: France was admitted to the central Committee of Five only in January 1815, more than two months after the opening that never opened.

The evening of 20 March 1815

Napoleon reached Paris on the evening of 20 March 1815 and entered the Tuileries Palace, which Louis XVIII had abandoned the night before.

John Quincy Adams, then in Paris, reported the next day that Napoleon arrived at the Tuileries at about 8 p.m. with no more than four or five regiments — and that the troops sent out to oppose him had come into the city with him.

Eleven hundred men, nineteen days earlier

Napoleon had landed at Golfe-Juan on 1 March with about 1,100 soldiers, and gained successive military defections as he marched north. Ney publicly rallied to him at Lons-le-Saunier on 14 March, removing an important military obstacle.

With the royal forces proving unreliable and Napoleon nearing the capital, Louis XVIII left Paris. A hostile palace witness later remembered officers lifting Napoleon above the crowd and carrying him into the Tuileries.

A government reassembled overnight

Napoleon began rebuilding an imperial government immediately; the Fondation Napoléon chronology places his installation at the Tuileries and the appointment of ministers across 20 and 21 March.

The march had been bloodless, which is not the same as welcomed everywhere — royalist resistance persisted, particularly in parts of the south and west. The liberalising Additional Act associated with Benjamin Constant came later: adopted on 22 April and submitted to a plebiscite on 1 June.

22 June 1815: a declaration at the Élysée

At the Élysée Palace on 22 June 1815, Napoleon issued an abdication declaring his political career ended and naming his son Napoleon II, Emperor of the French. Waterloo had been fought four days earlier.

The Chambers had already resisted his effort to continue the war and were moving toward declaring the throne vacant. Facing Coalition armies advancing on Paris and a legislature set against him, he abdicated.

The chambers avoided proclaiming Napoleon II

Delegations carried word to both legislative chambers that afternoon. Neither moved to recognize Napoleon II; instead they turned to debating a provisional government.

The Representatives and Peers elected a five-member Government Commission — Fouché, Carnot, Grenier, Caulaincourt and Quinette. The voting did not conclude until about 3 a.m. on 23 June.

A four-year-old emperor in Austria

Napoleon II, born 20 March 1811, was four years old and living in Austria. He exercised no authority in France, and no regency capable of governing in his name was set up; effective executive power sat with Fouché's commission.

Whether the boy ever reigned is disputed. Napoleon's declaration and imperial succession rules supported it, but the chambers deliberately avoided proclaiming him on 22 June, and the provisional government soon stopped invoking his name.

2 December 1823: an annual message, read and referred

On 2 December 1823, President James Monroe transmitted his seventh annual message to both houses of the Eighteenth Congress. The House read it and referred it to the Committee of the Whole on the State of the Union; the Senate ordered it printed.

The paragraph that later carried his name was prompted by negotiations with Russia over the northwest coast. In it Monroe declared that the American continents were no longer to be considered open to future European colonization.

The warnings, and the promises attached to them

An attempt by the allied European powers to extend their political system into the hemisphere, Monroe said, would be dangerous to U.S. peace and safety. European intervention to oppress or control the newly independent American governments the United States had recognized would show an unfriendly disposition toward the United States.

The same message promised no interference with European colonies already in existence, continued U.S. neutrality in Spain's war with its former colonies, and no interference in Europe's internal affairs.

A unilateral statement, quietly received

British foreign secretary George Canning had proposed an Anglo-American declaration against forcible European intervention in the former Spanish colonies. Secretary of State John Quincy Adams pushed instead for the United States to state its own position independently.

What Congress received and published was therefore a unilateral presidential policy statement. It created no treaty, statute, military commitment or enforcement mechanism that day, and European powers gave it relatively little notice.

The name is later than the message: the principles were not widely called the Monroe Doctrine until the 1850s.

Friday, 7 May 1824, at the Theater am Kärntnertor

Beethoven's Symphony No. 9 in D minor, Op. 125, was heard for the first time on Friday, 7 May 1824, at Vienna's Theater am Kärntnertor. The same programme carried the overture Die Weihe des Hauses and the Kyrie, Credo and Agnus Dei from the Missa solemnis.

Beethoven stood inside the ensemble, beat time, and may have indicated the opening tempos. The performers followed Michael Umlauf, who supplied the direction the orchestra and chorus actually took.

Four voices, and a very loud house

Henriette Sontag, Caroline Unger, Anton Haizinger and Joseph Seipelt were the soloists; they and the chorus entered only in the final movement.

Contemporary reports describe especially disruptive applause during the scherzo and repeated acclamation after the finale. Anton Schindler recorded four rounds at the close, with a fifth beginning as the police commissioner called for quiet.

Accounts agree that Unger drew Beethoven's attention to the applauding audience; they disagree over whether she turned him after the scherzo or at the end of the symphony.

Acclaimed, and not quite a triumph

The concert existed because friends and admirers had petitioned Beethoven to present his new works in Vienna. He hired the Kärntnertor's forces and supplemented them for an unusually demanding programme.

Organization proved difficult and the financial return disappointed him; a varied repeat concert followed on 23 May.

Nor does the audience's enthusiasm establish that a technically difficult premiere went cleanly, and recent study of Beethoven's conversation books challenges the usual claim that he was by then completely deaf.

Bitumen, pewter, and a window in Burgundy

In 1826 or 1827 — tradition gives 1826, while the plate's present owner catalogues it as 1827 — Joseph Nicéphore Niépce set a polished pewter plate coated with light-sensitive bitumen inside a camera obscura at a second-storey workroom window of his family's Le Gras estate at Saint-Loup-de-Varennes. No contemporary record fixes a single day.

The Harry Ransom Center's current account says the exposure ran for several days; older accounts estimate about eight hours. Either way, the plate came out of the camera holding a permanent impression of the courtyard, outbuildings and trees outside the window.

Niépce called the process héliographie — sun writing — and called camera-made pictures of this kind points de vue. The familiar title View from the Window at Le Gras is modern.

1826, 1827, or somewhere in between

1826 is the year the entry uses, and it is the dating Helmut Gernsheim promoted after he traced the forgotten plate's provenance and rediscovered it in 1952. Gernsheim later accepted the 1827 dating argued by Pierre-Georges Harmant and Paul Marillier.

The Harry Ransom Center, which bought the collection containing the heliograph in 1963 and owns it now, catalogues and interprets the object as a work of 1827.

No contemporary exposure log survives, so a frequently cited reconstruction narrowing production to 4 June–18 July 1827 should not be treated as a documented date.

What the object is, and is not

The length of the exposure left its trace in the picture itself: the sun moved far enough while the plate sat in the camera to light both sides of the buildings across the courtyard.

It is safest to call this the earliest surviving photograph made with the aid of a camera obscura rather than the first photograph outright — Niépce had produced fleeting camera images as early as 1816, and his heliographic copies complicate the broader claim.

It is the only known surviving Niépce point de vue, and it measures 16.7 by 20.3 by 0.15 centimetres.

August 1835, the South Gallery at Lacock Abbey

In August 1835, William Henry Fox Talbot placed sensitized paper inside a small camera obscura and aimed it at an oriel window in the South Gallery of Lacock Abbey, Wiltshire.

The paper was writing paper treated with salt and silver nitrate. Light coming through the window darkened the brightest portions most strongly, so the picture came out tonally reversed.

A negative about the size of a stamp

The result, known as "The Latticed Window," is the earliest known surviving photographic negative. Its image measures 3.6 by 2.8 centimetres.

Talbot inscribed the object "Latticed Window (with the Camera Obscura) August 1835" and recorded that about 200 panes could originally be counted in it with a lens.

How long the exposure ran is not settled: museum accounts range from about half an hour to a possible several hours.

What it was not

This was not the first surviving camera photograph. Nicéphore Niépce produced one around 1826, on a bitumen-coated plate; Talbot's claim is to the earliest surviving negative, which is not the same as the first ever made.

Talbot did not publicly announce his process in 1835. It remained experimental and was developed privately until Daguerre's competing process was announced in 1839.

11 January 1838, in the Factory Building at Speedwell

A crowd filled the Factory Building at the Speedwell Iron Works near Morristown, New Jersey, on 11 January 1838 for the first public exhibition of the improved Morse–Vail telegraph. The Speedwell historical marker puts the audience at one hundred; the National Park Service nomination says several hundred.

Electrical pulses travelled through wire looped inside the building and activated an electromagnetic recording instrument, which marked coded signals on paper. Nothing spoke or clicked out a message for the crowd.

"Railroad cars just arrived. 345 passengers."

That was the message the public demonstration transmitted — a deliberately mundane piece of breaking information.

Alfred Vail had built, refined and simplified the instruments at his family's works, helped by a shop assistant whose name the accounts give variously as Baxter and Baker; his father Stephen supplied a reported $2,000 and the workshop. Leonard Gale had helped Morse improve the battery and electromagnet in New York.

A Morristown newspaper reported the exhibition in its 17 January issue, remarking that the device effectively annihilated time and distance.

A contested January chronology

The records do not agree. Historic Speedwell accounts distinguish a 6 January private trial for Stephen Vail from the 11 January public exhibition, while a Morris County publication dates the successful trial to 8 January.

A Smithsonian account calls 6 January the first public demonstration and places Morse, Vail and Gale there; the National Park Service nomination instead credits Morse and Vail with inviting the audience in mid-January and describes Gale as working chiefly in New York.

The defensible claim is not the debut of the telegraph as such — other electrical telegraphs already existed — but the first public showing of the improved Morse–Vail recording system.

Monday, 7 January 1839, at the Academy of Sciences

At the Academy of Sciences in Paris on Monday, 7 January 1839, François Arago verbally introduced Louis Daguerre's discovery for permanently fixing camera-obscura images. The commonly listed date of 9 January is wrong; the Academy's own proceedings identify the session as the 7th.

Arago described the extraordinary precision and fine detail of the images. He did not reveal the chemical recipe.

An announcement, not a disclosure

Arago was the Academy's perpetual secretary as well as a legislator, and he was pushing a plan for the French state to buy the process and make it public. On 7 January both the purchase and the technical disclosure were unfinished business.

He likened the invention to an artificial retina that retained what it saw. The working procedure was not laid before the Academy until 19 August 1839.

Eighteen days to a rival claim

On 25 January, still without knowing Daguerre's technical details, William Henry Fox Talbot publicly presented his own photogenic drawings and asserted priority for his work.

What Daguerre had was a single direct-positive image on a silver-plated copper sheet, not a reproducible negative. The earliest daguerreotypes needed exposures of roughly three to fifteen minutes.