A Life

By Andrew Roberts

‘The apocryphal historians multiply,’ Napoleon wrote in 1807. ‘There is such a vast difference between one book and another on the same subject written in different epochs … that he who would seek sound knowledge and is suddenly placed in a vast historical library finds himself thrown into a veritable labyrinth.’ 

With over fifteen hundred people having recorded their memories of Napoleon in some form or another, that labyrinth is not always easy to navigate.

Napoleon has been quoted and misquoted, lionized and pilloried, and his aphorisms plucked at random like passages from Machiavelli’s Prince. His seventy-eight military maxims were not even compiled by him, but rather extracted, entirely out of context, from his correspondence and dictated statements on St Helena.

(Roberts 2014, xl)

All too often, biographies of Napoleon adopt the suspiciously easy trope by which his deranged hubris-tied up with what has erroneously become known as the Napoleon Complex-inevitably led to his well-deserved nemesis. This clichéd paradigm of ancient Greek drama sometimes comes with the comforting suggestion that such is the fate that overtakes all tyrants sooner or later. ‘History is an argument without end,’ Geyl said, believing that every generation has to write its own biography of Napoleon. My own interpretation is very different from other historians’. What brought Napoleon down was not some deep-seated personality disorder but a combination of unforeseeable circumstances coupled with a handful of significant miscalculations: something altogether more believable, human and fascinating.

(Roberts 2014, xi-xli)

‘I believe every officer ought to serve in the artillery,’ he was to say, ‘which is the arm that can produce most of the good generals.’ This was not merely self-serving: French artillery commanders of his day were to include the fine generals Jean-Baptiste Éblé, Alexandre-Antoine Sénarmont, Antoine Drouot, Jean de Lariboisière, Auguste de Marmont and Charles-Étienne Ruty.

‘There is nothing in the military profession I cannot do for myself;’ Napoleon was to boast. ‘If there is no-one to make gunpowder, I know how to make it; gun carriages, I know how to construct them; if it is founding a cannon, I know that; or if the details of tactics must be taught, I can teach them.’

(Roberts 2014, 25)

A witness who was present when Napoleon heard the news of Louis’ death recalled his privately saying, ‘Oh! The wretches! The poor wretches! They will go through anarchy.” Napoleon thought of the king’s execution – followed in October by that of Marie Antoinette – as a tactical error. ‘Had the French been more moderate and not put Louis to death,’ he later opined, all Europe would have been revolutionized: the war saved England. Yet at the time he publicly supported what had been done, and started his letters with the republican address ‘Citizen’.

(Roberts 2014, 41)

Napoleon prepared to use grapeshot, the colloquial term for canister or case shot, which consists of hundreds of musket balls packed into a metal case that rips open as soon as it leaves the cannon’s muzzle, sending the lead balls flying in a relatively wide are at an even greater velocity than the 1,760 feet per second of a musket shot. Its maximum range was roughly 600 yards, optimum. The use of grapeshot on civilians was hitherto unknown in Paris, and was testament to Napoleon’s ruthlessness that he was willing to contemplate it. He was not about to be a coglione, ‘If you treat the mob with kindness,’ he told Joseph later, these creatures fancy themselves invulnerable, if you hang a few, they get tired of the game, and become as submissive and humble as they ought to be.’

(Roberts 2014, 66)

Napoleon has been criticized for lying in his post-battle reports, but it is absurd to ascribe conventional morality to these reports since disinformation has been an acknowledged weapon of war since the days of Sun-tzu. (Winston Churchill once observed that in wartime, truth is so precious that she needs to be defended by a bodyguard of lies.) Where Napoleon did err, however, was in making the exaggerations so endemic that in the end even genuine victories came to be disbelieved, or at least discounted; the phrase ‘to lie like a bulletin’ entered the French language. When he could, Napoleon gave the French people hard evidence, sending captured enemy standards to be displayed at the military church of Les Invalides, but throughout his career he displayed an extraordinary ability to present terrible news as merely bad, bad news as unwelcome but acceptable, acceptable news as good, and good news as a triumph.

(Roberts 2014, 92)

Just as General Jean-Joseph Pijon’s brigade was being driven from Lonato, with Pijon himself being captured, Napoleon arrived leading elements of Masséna’s division. He ordered the 32nd Line into ‘columns of platoons’ and without pause, and with drummers and musicians playing, sent them into a bayonet charge, supported by the Sth Lìne. Despite losing both battalion commanders, they hurled the Austrians back towards Desenzano, straight into the path of Napoleon’s escort company of cavalry, together with elements of the 15th Dragoons and 4th Légère. Junot received six wounds, but this did not prevent him from accepting the surrender of the entire Austrian brigade. On hearing of the disaster, Quasdanovich retreated right around the north side of the lake to rejoin Wurmser. He would remain out of action for the next ten days. ‘I was tranquil,’ Napoleon wrote in his post-battle bulletin. ‘The brave 32nd Demi-Brigade was there.’ The 32nd had those words embroidered in large gold letters on its colours, and their pride spurred them to greater courage. It is astonishing what power words have over men,’ Napoleon said of the 32nd years later.

(Roberts 2014, 111)

While sailing to Egypt from Malta, Napoleon wrote General Orders about how the army was to behave once ashore. Public treasures and the houses and offices of the revenue collectors were to be sealed up; Mamluks were to be arrested and their horses and camels requisitioned; all towns and villages would be disarmed. ‘Every soldier who shall enter into the houses of the inhabitants to steal horses or camels shall be punished,’ he instructed. He was particularly careful to give no cause for a jihad. ‘Do not contradict them,’ he ordered his men with regard to Muslims. ‘Deal with them as we dealt with the Jews and with the Italians.Respect their muftis and imams as you respected rabbis and bishops…The Roman legions protected all religions … The people here treat their wives differently from us, but in all countries the man who commits rape is a monster.’ He added that the first town they would enter had been founded by Alexander the Great, something that meant much more to him than to them.

(Roberts 2014, 168)

Additionally, having narrowly escaped being bitten by a ‘horned serpent’ in a Theban grotto, Citizen Ripaud, the librarian of the Institut de l’Égypte, wrote a 104-page report for the Commission of Arts on the existing state of the antiquities from the Nile cataracts to Cairo,” The savants’ greatest discovery was the Rosetta Stone, a stele in three languages found at El-Rashid in the Delta. They made copies and translated the Greek portion before starting to work on the hieroglyphics, Under the peace agreement covering the French withdrawal in 1801, the Stone was handed over to the British and sent to the British Museum, where it still safely resides. Tragically, the Institut near Tahrir Square in Cairo was burned down during the Arab Spring uprising on December 17, 2011, and almost all its 192,000 books, journals and other manuscripts including the only handwritten manuscript of Denon’s Description de l’Égypte – were destroyed.

(Roberts 2014, 205)

At breakfast at the rue de la Victoire on October 26 Napoleon openly criticized the Directory to Thiébault, contrasting their soldiers’ esprit on the Italian campaign with the government’s lethargy.’A nation is always what you have the wit to make it,’ he said. ‘The triumph of faction, parties, divisions, is the fault of those in authority only. No people are bad under a good government, just as no troops are bad under good generals … These men are bringing France down to the level of their own blundering. They are degrading her, and she is beginning to repudiate them? Forthright opinions like those had cost lives earlier in the Revolution, but Napoleon felt secure enough to talk sedition to a comrade he was hoping to win over, ending with one of his most regular condemnations: ‘Well, what can generals expect from this government of lawyers?’

(Roberts 2014, 213)

Later on that day, presumably after Signorina Grassini had left, two hundred Catholic priests arrived at the palace to discuss theology. Napoleon asked them to allow him to ‘acquaint you with the sentiments which animate me towards the Catholic, Apostolic and Roman religion’. He made no reference to the view he had expressed to the Cairo diwan less than a year before, that “There is no other God but God; Mohammed is his prophet, but instead explained that Catholicism ‘is particularly favourable to republican institutions. I am myself a philosopher, and I know that, in no matter what society, man is considered just and virtuous who does not know whence he came and whither he is going. Simple reason cannot guide him in this matter, without religion one walks continually in darkness. Faith, for Napoleon, was an evolving concept, even a strategic one. When he said he adopted the faith of wherever he was fighting at the time he was quite serious, and in northern Italy that meant Roman Catholicism.

(Roberts 2014, 258)

‘After a great battle,’ wrote Captain Blaze, ‘there is plenty of food for the crows and the bulletin-writers.’ Napoleon had made three major errors: in going onto the plain in the first place, in not anticipating Melas’s attack and in sending Desaix so far away. But he had won, and for political reasons it was imperative that Marengo be seen as his triumph, or at least one shared with the dead Desaix. The post-battle bulletin was thus pure propaganda, implying that the Austrians had fallen into his trap. ‘The battle appeared to be lost,” it stated somewhat fancifully. “The enemy was allowed to advance within musket range of the village of San Giuliano, where General Desaix’s division was drawn up in the line of battle. Napoleon also invented some last words for Desaix: ‘Go tell the First Consul that I die with the regret of having not done enough to live in posterity.’ (In fact he had died instantaneously.) Berthier’s official history of the battle had to go through three revisions before Napoleon approved it. By January 1815 Napoleon was uncharitably claiming that Marengo had been won before Desaix arrived. The view of Desaix’s aide-de-camp Anne-Jean-Marie-René Savary was that ‘If General Desaix had delayed an hour in arriving, we’d have been driven into the Po.

(Roberts 2014, 268)

‘I must give the people their full rights in religion. Philosophers will laugh, but the nation will bless me.’ – Napoleon to Chaptal

(Roberts 2014, 270)

Napoleon made a number of concessions, none too onerous, The ten-day week was suppressed and Sunday was restored as the day of rests the Gregorian calendar eventually returned in January 1896, children were to be given saints’ or classical rather than wholly secular or revolutionary names salaries were paid to all clergy, orders of nuns and of missionaries were reintroduced in a minor way, and primary education was restored to the clergy’s remit,?” Meanwhile, the Church would sing Te Deums for Napoleon’s victories, read his proclamations from its pulpits and depict conscription as a patriotic duty. On all the major points of contention, Napoleon got what he wanted. With the end of the schism, no fewer than 10,000 Constitutional priests returned to the bosom of the Roman Church and one of the deepest wounds of the Revolution was healed.

(Roberts 2014, 273-274)

At the Treaty of San Ildefonso, Napoleon had promised Spain not to sell Louisiana to a third party, a commitment he now decided to ignore.On the same day that Whitworth called for his passports in Paris, across the Atlantic President Thomas Jefferson signed the Louisiana Purchase, doubling the size of the United States at the stroke of his pen. The Americans paid France 80 million francs for 875,000 square miles of territory that today comprises all or some of thirteen states from the Gulf of Mexico across the Midwest right up to the Canadian border, at a cost of less than four cents an acre. ‘Irresolution and deliberation are no longer in season,’ Napoleon wrote to Talleyrand. ‘I renounce Louisiana.It is not only New Orleans that I cede; it is the whole colony, without reserve; I know the price of what I abandon … I renounce it with the greatest regret: to attempt obstinately to retain it would be folly.

After the Saint-Domingue debacle and the collapse of Amiens, Napoleon concluded he must realize his largest and (for the immediate future) entirely useless asset, one that might eventually have drawn France into conflict with the United States. Instead, by helping the United States to continental greatness, and enriching the French treasury in the process, Napoleon was able to prophesy: ‘I have just given to England a maritime rival that sooner or later will humble her pride.” Within a decade, the United States was at war with Britain rather than with France, and the War of 1812 was to draw off British forces that were still fighting in February 1815, and which might otherwise have been present at Waterloo.

(Roberts 2014, 324-325)

As always, Napoleon required more than warfare and politics for his mental nourishment. On October 1 he thanked the American physicist Sir Benjamin Thomson, who was living in Paris, for his dissertation on heat conservation, and commented:

The rough surface of unpolished bodies is mountainous compared to the extreme attenuation of calorific molecules; their total surface area is much greater than that of the same body when polished, and from the area of the surface used for measuring the number of issues or accesses of calories, it follows that this number must be greater, and therefore, temperature changes should be faster for an unpolished body than for a body that is polished. 

These are the ideas that I formulated, and that were confirmed by your paper. It is through many experiments made with precision, in order to arrive at the truth … that we advance gradually and arrive at simple theories, useful to all states of life.

That last sentence alone confirms Napoleon as a product of the Enlightenment.

(Roberts 2014, 330)

By the time Napoleon was ready to declare himself emperor, many of the great republican generals who might have objected were gone: Hoche, Kléber and Joubert were dead; Dumouriez was in exile; Pichegru and Moreau were about to go on trial for treachery. Only Jourdan, Augereau, Bernadotte and Brune remained and they were about to be placated with marshals’ batons. The explanation Napoleon gave Soult – ‘An end should be put to the hopes of the Bourbons’ – was of course not the whole reason; he also wanted to be able to address Francis of Austria and Alexander of Russia as equals, and perhaps also Augustus, Hadrian and Constantine. France was de facto an empire by 1804, and it was only acknowledging that fact that Napoleon declared himself an emperor de jure, just as Queen Victoria would become for the British Empire in 1877. Astonishingly few Frenchmen opposed the return to an hereditary monarchy only eleven years after the execution of Louis XVI, and those who did were promised the opportunity to vote against it in a plebiscite.

(Roberts 2014, 342)

Much of the first nine months of 1806 was spent by Napoleon in his Conseil, covering a characteristically wide range of matters. March saw him complaining about his 300,90-franc upholsterer’s bill for his throne and six armchairs, which he was refusing to pay, as well as insisting that priests charge no more than 6 francs for conducting the funerals of the poor: ‘We ought not to deprive the poor merely because they are poor of that which consoles their poverty; Napoleon said. Religion is a kind of vaccination, which, by satisfying our natural love for the marvellous, keeps us out of the hands of charlatans and conjurors. The priests are better than the Cagliostros, the Kants, and all the visionaries of Germany.’

(Roberts 2014, 401)

On May 30, 1806 Napoleon passed a ‘Decree on Jews and Usury’ that accused the Jews of ‘unjust greed and lacking ‘the sentiments of civic morality’, gave a year’s relief from debt repayment in Alsace and called a Grand Sanhedrin in order to reduce the shameful expedient of lending money (something his own Bank of France did on a daily basis, of course). This was the first sign of hostility towards a people to whom Napoleon had hitherto shown amity and respect; henceforth he seems to have been uncharacteristically unsure of himself when it came to poljey towards the Jews. Although he didn’t meet many Jews during his childhood or at school, and none of his friends were Jewish, during the Italian campaign he had opened up the ghettos of Venice, Verona, Padua, Livorno, Ancona and Rome, and ended the practice of forcing Jews to wear the Star of David. He had stopped Jews being sold as slaves in Malta and allowed them to build a synagogue there, as well as sanctioning their religious and social structures in his Holy Land campaign. He had even written a proclamation for a Jewish homeland in Palestine on April 20, 1799, which was rendered redundant after his defeat at Acre (but was nonetheless published in the Moniteur). He extended civil equality for the Jews beyond the borders of France in all his campaigns. Yet on his return to Paris after Austerlitz, Napoleon was petitioned by Salzburg businessmen and bankers to restrict Jewish lending to Alsatian farmers. Alsatian Jews made up nearly half of France’s Jewish population of 55,000, and they were blamed for excessive’ usury’ in that curious inversion whereby people who borrow money under free contracts in an open market blame those who lend it to them. The Conseil investigated the issue further, and was severely split over it. Napoleon told his councilors that he did not want to ‘sully my glory in the eyes of posterity’ by allowing the anti-Semitic Alsatian laws to stand, so they were repealed clause by clause over the following months.

(Roberts 2014, 402-403)

Under the terms of the founding of the Rhine Confederation, Napoleon now had an extra 63,000 German troops at his disposal, a number that was soon increased; indeed the term ‘French army’ becomes something of a misnomer from 1806 until the Confederation’s collapse in 1813. Another consequence was that Frederick William III of Prussia had to give up any further hope of playing a significant leadership role beyond the borders of his own state, unless he was prepared to take part in a fourth coalition against France. Meanwhile, the Confederation fostered a nascent sense of German nationalism, and dreams that one day Germany could be an independent state ruled by Germans. There is no more powerful example of history’s law of unintended consequences than that Napoleon should have contributed to the creation of the country that was, half a century after his death, to destroy the French Empire of his own nephew, Napoleon III.’

(Roberts 2014, 407)

What has been described as Napoleon’s “re-hierarchization of French life involved a complete reordering of the social system. At the top were high-ranking army officers, ministers, councillors of state, prefects, presidents of the electoral colleges, senior judges, the mayors of the larger cities, and a few academics, professionals and artists. Below them came the more than 30,000 members of the Légion d’Honneur. Further down were around 100,000 sub-prefects, mayors of lesser cities, officials of the educational, judicial and administrative arms of the state, members of the electoral colleges, chambers of commerce, prefects councils and other office-holders and notables. These were Napoleon’s true “masses of granite”. Lying deep within the French Revolution were the seeds of its own destruction because the concepts of liberty, equality and fraternity are mutually exclusive. A society can be formed around two of them, but never all three. Liberty and equality, if they are strictly observed, will obliterate fraternity; equality and fraternity must extinguish liberty; and fraternity and liberty can only come at the expense of equality. If extreme equality of outcome is the ultimate goal, as it was for the Jacobins, it will crush liberty and fraternity. With his creation of a new nobility Napoleon dispensed with that concept of equality, and instead enshrined in the French polity the concept of equality before the law in which he believed wholeheartedly.

(Roberts 2014, 465)

Austria formally declared war on France and Bavaria on April 3, and Archduke Charles (though he was personally opposed to the declaration, thinking that war came too early) issued a martial proclamation to the Austrian people on the 6th.*

*That day Napoleon ordered his sister Elisa – whom he had made Grand Duchess of Tuscany the previous month – to ban gambling in Florence, as in the rest of his Empire, because fit causes the ruin of families and sets a bad example’ (CG9 no. 20738 p. 443). He made an exception for Paris, because it cannot be prevented, and because it is turned to account by the police’.

(Roberts 2014, 502)

‘Does a man have the right to kill himself? he had asked in his 1786 essay, ‘On Suicide’. ‘Yes, if his death harms no other person and his life is ill for him.’ He knew that Seneca, Pliny, Martial, Tacitus and Lucan all celebrated the act. Yet when in 1802 a grenadier called Gobain had killed himself for love, the second such incident in a month, Napoleon sternly addressed an Order of the Day on the issue, stating that a ‘soldier should know how to conquer the pain and the melancholy of his passions; that there is as much courage evinced in suffering grapeshot. That to give oneself up to chagrin without resistance and to kill oneself is to abandon the battlefield before being conquered in Although Marcus Porcius Cato’s suicide was praised by his contemporaries, in his biography of Julius Caesar Napoleon asked: ‘But to whom was his death useful? To Caesar. To whom did it give pleasure? To Caesar. For whom was it fatal? For Rome, for his party … He killed himself out of scorn, out of desperation. His death was the weakness of a great soul, the error of a Stoic, a blemish on his life.’ Napoleon didn’t commit suicide on St Helena probably because it would give his enemies too much pleasure, as he himself put it: ‘It needs more courage to suffer than to die.’ He told the Malcolms in June 1817,

I have worn the imperial crown of France, the iron crown of Italy; England has now given me a greater and more glorious (one) than either of them – for it is that crown worn by the Saviour of the world – a crown of thorns. Oppression and every insult that is offered to me only adds to my glory, and it is to the persecutions of England I shall owe the brightest part of my fame.

It was typically hyperbolic, unusually blasphemous and factually incorrect on many levels, but living on St Helena having once ruled most of Europe was a harsh punishment indeed (though far better than the execution that the Bourbons and Prussians had wanted for him). When there was a slight earthquake that summer, he told an aide ‘that we ought to have been swallowed up, island and all. It would be so pleasant to die in company.’ He clutched at any future political developments that might result in his release, citing an insurrection in France’, Lord Holland becoming prime minister, the death of Louis XVIII, and the Prince Regent’s only child, Princess Charlotte, becoming queen of England, saying: “She will bring me back to Europe. In reality, none of these provided the least likelihood of salvation for him, especially after November 1817, when Charlotte died and was replaced as the Prince Regent’s heir by his unsympathetic younger brother, the future King William IV.

(Roberts 2014, 794-795)

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References

Roberts, Andrew. 2014. Napoleon: A Life. N.p.: Viking.

ISBN 978-0-670-02532-9