16.The Battle of Friedland
17.Spain and Portugal
18.Landshut campaign, 1809
19.The Battle of Wagram
20.The Empire at its furthest extent, 1812
21.Napoleon’s route to and from Moscow in 1812
22.The Battle of Borodino
23.The 1813 campaign
24.The Battle of Dresden
25.The Battle of Leipzig
26.The 1814 campaign
27.The route Napoléon, 1815
28.The Waterloo campaign
29.The Battle of Waterloo, 18 June
Acknowledgements
Having now spent longer researching and writing this book than Napoleon himself spent on St Helena and Elba put together, I’ve collected a disconcertingly large array of people whom I would like to thank for their unfailing generosity, good nature, time and help. They include President Nicolas Sarkozy for his insights into the state of thinking about Napoleon in France today; David Cameron and Rodney Melville for allowing me to research the Napoleon correspondence at Chequers; Xavier Darcos of the Academie Française and Institut de France for introductions in Paris; Mervyn King for his thoughts on French and British debt-financing of the Napoleonic Wars; Carole Aupoix for showing me a louse such as the ones that spread the typhus that devastated Napoleon’s armies in Russia; the late Archduke Otto von Hapsburg for his views on Marie Louise’s ‘déclassé’ marriage to Napoleon; Lady Mary Berry for showing me the chairs used at the Congress of Vienna; Jayne Wrightsman for showing me her collection of Napoleonic book bindings; Robert Pirie for his encouragement; the late Lady Alexandra Dacre for her memories of the Empress Eugénie; Dušan Frýbort at Austerlitz, for letting me fire his Napoleonic musket; Ms Evan Lattimer for allowing me to see what is purported to be Napoleon’s ‘tendon’; Charles-Henry and Jean-Pascal Tranié; Jerry and Jane Del Missier for their wonderful hospitality on Lake Geneva; Nicholas Steed for his reports on Napoleon in Malta; the Earl and Countess of Carnarvon for showing me Napoleon’s chair from Fontainebleau and desk from the Tuileries; Robin Birley for his great generosity; the Countess of Rosebery for showing me the Emperor’s travelling library; Dr Henry Kissinger for his thoughts on the Congress of Vienna; Prof. Charles Esdaile for inviting me to his excellent Napoleon at the Zenith conference at Liverpool University in 2007; Deborah Edlmann; Rurik Ingram; my cousins Philip and Sandra Engelen for putting me up in Cape Town on my St Helena journey (which took me a fortnight, largely by Royal Mail ship); Zac Gertler for his hospitality and generosity in Tel Aviv; Caroline Dalmeny for lending me a lock of Napoleon’s hair, which has sat on my desk throughout, inspiring me, and Baudouin Prot of BNP Paribas for allowing me to visit the room in which Napoleon and Josephine were married. I would also like to apologize profoundly to Jérôme Tréca and the staff of Fontainebleau Palace for setting off the burglar alarms in Napoleon’s throne room no fewer than three times.
An historian who doesn’t visit battlefields is akin to a detective who doesn’t bother to visit the scene of the crime. In the course of researching this book I have visited fifty-three of Napoleon’s sixty battlefields, most of them in the company of the distinguished military historian John Lee. It has been one of the greatest pleasures of writing this book to have walked with John over the ground of Montenotte, Mondovi, Lodi, Mantua, Arcole, Castiglione, Rivoli, Rovereto, Dego, Marengo, Ulm, Austerlitz, Jena, Eylau, Friedland, Abensberg, Landshut, Eggmühl, Ratisbon, Aspern-Essling, Wagram, Maloyaroslavets, Lützen, Bautzen, Dresden, Leipzig, Reichenbach, Brienne, La Rothière, Champaubert, Montmirail, Château-Thierry, Vauchamps, Montereau, Craonne, Laon, Reims, Arcis-sur-Arbe and St-Dizier. John’s advice and insights in our blizzards of emails have been sans pareil, his battle-notes from Napoleon’s campaigns have proved completely invaluable, and his friendship is a joy. I cannot thank him enough, as well as his wife Celia, who has put up with him coming battlefielding with me so very often.
In the sixty-nine archives, libraries, museums and research institutes that I’ve visited in fifteen countries during the course of my researches, I’ve met with nothing but helpfulness and friendliness, and I would in particular like to thank:
France: Sacha Topalovich and Florence Tarneaud at the Archives Nationales, Paris; Y. Bamratta and Laurence Le Bras at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France’s Tolbiac and Richelieu sites respectively; Anne Georgeon-Liskenne at the Centre des Archives Diplomatiques, La Courneuve; Claude Ponnou and Thisio Bernard at the Service Historique de la Défense, Vincennes; Sylvie Biet and Danièle Chartier at the Bibliothèque Thiers; Gérard Leyris at the Musée Carnavalet; the British ambassador to Paris, Sir Peter Westmacott, and his butler, Ben Newick, for showing me around Pauline Borghese’s house in Paris, now the British Embassy; Susanne Wasum-Rainer, the German ambassador to Paris, for showing me around her residence, l’Hôtel de Beauharnais, Josephine’s immaculate present to her son Eugène; Léonore Losserand at St-Joseph-des-Carmes; David Demangeot, curator at the former palace of St-Cloud; Aurore Lacoste de Laval at the École Militaire; Christopher Palmer, First Secretary at the US Embassy in Paris, and Mrs Robin Smith, the Directrice of the Marshall Center at the Hôtel Talleyrand; Angelique Duc at the Musée Napoléon de Brienne-le-Château; Fanny de Jubecourt at Les Invalides and the Musée de l’Armée; Dr Thierry Lentz and Prof. Peter Hicks for being so welcoming at the superb Fondation Napoléon; Alain Pougetoux at the Château de Malmaison; Xavier Cayon at the Conseil d’État in the Palais-Royal (formerly the Tribunate); Mme Marianne Lambert at Marshal Lannes’ Château de Maisons-Laffitte; M and Mme Benoit D’Abonville; Quentin Aymonier at the Fort de Joux in the Jura; my son Henry and daughter Cassia for accompanying me to Corsica; the staffs of the Palais et Musée de la Légion d’Honneur, Paris; the Musée de la Préfecture de Police, Paris; the Maison d’Éducation de la Légion d’Honneur at St-Denis; the Panthéon, and the Musée Fesch and the Musée National de la Maison Bonaparte in Ajaccio, Corsica.
Russia: Alexander Suhanov and Elvira Chulanova of the State Museum of Borodino for showing me around the battlefield of Borodino; Oleg Aleksandrov of Three Whales Tours for taking me to the battlefield of Maloyaroslavets; Maciej Morawski of City Events for taking me to the battlefields of Eylau and Friedland in the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad; Konstantin Nazarov at the Maloyaroslavets Military History Museum; Alexandr Panchenko of the Bagrationovsk Historical Museum on the Eylau battlefield; Valery Shabanov and Vladimir Ukievich Katz of the Russian State Military Historical Archive in Moscow, and Marina Zboevskaya of the Borodino Panorama Museum in Moscow.
Belarus: Prof. Igor Groutso for showing me the battlefield of the Berezina river, and Rakhovich Natalya Stepanovna of the Borisov Combined Museum.
Israel: Dr Eado Hecht for showing me the battlefields of Kakun, Jaffa and Mount Thabor, and Dr Alon Keblanoff for showing me the siege sites of Acre; Prof. Azar Gat of Tel Aviv University, and Liat Margolit at the Tel Dor Archaeological Museum.
St Helena: Michel Dancoisne-Martineau, the supremely diligent French Honorary Consul and Conservator at Longwood for my hugely enjoyable days there; Aron Legg for showing me Mount Pleasant, Diana’s Peak, Prosperous Bay, The Briars, Sandy Bay and Jamestown, and Andrew Wells, the former Chief Secretary of St Helena.
Belgium: Ian Fletcher and Colonel John Hughes-Wilson, who showed me Waterloo; Benoît Histace, President of the Museum of the Battle of Ligny, who took me around the battlefield of Ligny, and Count François and Countess Susanne Cornet d’Elzius, the owners of La Haie Sainte.
Great Britain: Lucy McCann at the Rhodes House Library, Oxford; Leigh McKiernan at the Special Collections Reading Room of the Bodleian Library, Oxford; Prof. Nick Mayhew of the Heberden Coin Room at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford; Allen Packwood at the Churchill Archives, Cambridge; Josephine Oxley at Apsley House; Paul Roberts at the British Museum; Katy Canales and Pim Dodd at the National Army Museum; Hilary Burton and John Rochester at the Royal H
ospital, Chelsea; Richard Daniels at the London College of Communication; Richard Tennant of the British Commission for Military History, and the staffs of the Royal Navy Museum at Portsmouth, the British Library and the London Library.
Italy: Lario Zerbini at the Rivoli Museum; my daughter Cassia for accompanying me to Elba; Nello Anselmi at the Santuario della Madonna del Monte at Marciana, Elba; Elisabetta Lalatta of the Fondazione Serbelloni at the Palazzo Serbelloni in Milan; Riccardo Bianceli at the Palazzo Ducale in Mantua, and the staffs of the Museo Napoleonico in Rome, the Marengo Museum at Spinetta Marengo, the Villa Reale at Monza, and the Villa di San Martino, Elba.
The Czech Republic: Simona Lipovska of the Cairn of Peace Memorial Museum and Jana Slukova of Slavkov Castle at Austerlitz.
Austria: Helmut Tiller of the Aspern and Essling Museums; Rupert Derbic of the Wagram Museum, and the staffs at Schönbrunn Palace and the Heeresgeschichtliches Museum in Vienna.
Portugal: Mark Crathorne and Luiz Saldanha Lopes for showing me around Forts 40, 41, 42, 95 of the Lines of Torres Vedras; and the staff of the Military Museum of Lisbon.
Germany: The staffs of the Bavarian Army Museum at Ingolstadt, the 1806 Museum at JenaCospeda, and the Torhaus Museum in Markkleeberg on the Leipzig battlefield.
The United States: Jay Barksdale of the Allen Room and Elizabeth Denlinger of the Pforzheimer Room at the New York Public Library; Declan Kiely at the Pierpont Morgan Library; Kathryn James at the Beinecke Library and Steve Ross at the Sterling Memorial Library at Yale; Elaine Engst and Laurent Ferri at the Carl A. Kroch Library’s Manuscript Collections at Cornell University; the Merrill family, who so generously funded my visiting professorship at Cornell; Prof. Barry and Dr Marcia Strauss at Cornell for their delightful hospitality and my students there who came up with their own reasons for why Napoleon invaded Russia; Prof. Rafe Blaufarb, Director of the Institute on Napoleon and the French Revolution, for making my stay at Florida State University so enjoyable; Eric Robinson of the New-York Historical Society Library; Katie McCormick at the Robert Manning Strozier Library at Florida State University Special Collections; Elisabeth Fairman at the Yale Center for British Art; Dr Robert Pickering, Curator of the Gilcrease Museum in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and Dr William J. Lademan, Director of the Wargaming Division at the Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory.
Sweden: Aviva Cohen-Silber for showing me the Bernadotte Rooms at the Royal Palace in Stockholm.
Switzerland: Paola Gianoli Tuena at the Château Le Coppet on Lake Geneva.
Canada: Bruce McNiven for showing me around the Napoleon galleries at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts.
I would also like to thank Josh Sutton, Charlie Mitchell and Katie Russell for their historical research, as well as Julie di Filippo for German translations, Beata Widulinska for Polish, Timothy Chapman for Spanish, Eado Hecht for Hebrew, Dr Galina Babkova for Russian, and Annaliese Ellidge-Weaver, Helena Fosh, Maxine Harfield-Neyrand, Gilles Vauclair and Carole Aupoix for French. Maxine was particularly encouraging and helpful in negotiating through the sometimes arcane byways of five Parisian research institutions.
This book was written while I was filming a BBC TV documentary series about Napoleon, and I would like to thank David Notman-Watt, Simon Shaps, David Barrie, Anna Dangoor, Patrick Duval and Tony Burke for making the whole process so enjoyable and thought-provoking.
Since Napoleon’s death has become – needlessly in my view – so controversial, I took expert medical advice about the Emperor’s death from Dr Tim Barrie, Prof. Ira Jacobsen of Cornell, Dr Albert Knapp, Dr Robert Krasner, Dr Archana Vats, Dr James Le Fanu, Dr Pamela Yablon, Dr Guy O’Keefe and Dr Michael Crumplin, to whom I extend my thanks. I should also like to thank Dr Frank Reznek for his diagnosis on Napoleon’s dental problems on St Helena.
For reading my manuscript and their invaluable suggestions for its improvement, I would like to thank Helena Fosh, Sudhir Hazareesingh, John Lee, Stephen Parker, Jürgen Sacht and Gilles Vauclair.
My agent Georgina Capel of Capel & Land and publishers Stuart Proffitt and Joy de Menil of Penguin have been their usual perfect models of efficiency, professionalism and charm, as were my inspired copy-editors Peter James and Charlotte Ridings. The painstaking work that Stuart and Joy put into this book improved it enormously, and I really cannot thank them enough for it.
My fabulous wife Susan Gilchrist has examined guillotine blades with me, counted the skulls of massacred monks in the crypt of the church where Josephine was imprisoned, driven with me along the Route Napoléon, and went to the Al-Azhar Mosque in Cairo with me, not just for its inherent architectural and cultural interest, but because it was where the 1798 revolt began and ended. I couldn’t have written this book without her constant love and support; she’s my Josephine, Marie Louise and Marie Walewska all rolled into one.
This book is dedicated to my siblings Ashley Gurdon and Matthew and Eliot Roberts, for putting up with their know-all big brother for so long and so graciously.
• • •
Andrew Roberts
2, rue Augereau, Paris
www.andrew-roberts.net
Introduction
Napoleon Bonaparte was the founder of modern France and one of the great conquerors of history. He came to power through a military coup only six years after entering the country as a penniless political refugee. As First Consul and later Emperor, he almost won hegemony in Europe, but for a series of coalitions specifically designed to bring him down. Although his conquests ended in defeat and ignominious imprisonment, over the course of his short but eventful life he fought sixty battles and lost only seven. For any general, of any age, this was an extraordinary record. Yet his greatest and most lasting victories were those of his institutions, which put an end to the chaos of the French Revolution and cemented its guiding principle of equality before the law. Today the Napoleonic Code forms the basis of law in Europe and aspects of it have been adopted by forty countries spanning every continent except Antarctica. Napoleon’s bridges, reservoirs, canals and sewers remain in use throughout France. The French foreign ministry sits above the stone quays he built along the Seine, and the Cour des Comptes still checks public spending accounts more than two centuries after he founded it. The Légion d’Honneur, an honor he introduced to take the place of feudal privilege, is highly coveted; France’s top secondary schools, many of them founded by Napoleon, provide excellent education and his Conseil d’État still meets every Wednesday to vet laws. Even if Napoleon hadn’t been one of the great military geniuses of history, he would still be a giant of the modern era.
The leadership skills he employed to inspire his men have been adopted by other leaders over the centuries, yet never equaled except perhaps by his great devotee Winston Churchill. Some of his techniques he learned from the ancients—especially his heroes Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar—and others he conceived himself in response to the circumstances of the day. The fact that his army was willing to follow him even after the retreat from Moscow, the battle of Leipzig and the fall of Paris testifies to his capacity to make ordinary people feel that they were capable of doing extraordinary, history-making deeds. A more unexpected aspect of Napoleon’s personality that also came out strongly over the course of researching this book was his fine sense of humour. All too often historians have taken seriously remarks that were clearly intended as humorous. Napoleon was constantly joking to his family and entourage, even in the most dire situations. Scores of examples pit this book.
Napoleon’s love affair with Josephine has been presented all too often in plays, novels and movies as a Romeo and Juliet story: in fact, it was anything but. He had an overwhelming crush on her, but she didn’t love him, at least in the beginning, and was unfaithful from the very start of their marriage. When he learned of her infidelities two years later while on campaign in the middle of the Egyptian desert, he was devastated. He took a mistress in Cairo in part to protect himself from accusati
ons of cuckoldry, which were far more dangerous for a French general of the era than those of adultery. Yet he forgave Josephine when he returned to France, and they started off on a decade of harmonious marital and sexual contentment, despite his taking a series of mistresses. Josephine remained faithful and even fell in love with him. When he decided to divorce for dynastic and geostrategic reasons, Josephine was desolate but they remained friendly. Napoleon’s second wife, Marie Louise, would also be unfaithful to him, with an Austrian general Napoleon had defeated on the battlefield but clearly couldn’t match in bed.
Napoleon was able to compartmentalize his life to quite a remarkable degree, much more so even than most statesmen and great leaders. He could entirely close off one part of his mind to what was going on in the rest of it; he himself likened it to being able to open and close drawers in a cupboard. On the eve of battle, as aides-de-camp were arriving and departing with orders to his marshals and reports from his generals, he could dictate his thoughts on the establishment of a girls’ school for the orphans of members of the Légion d’Honneur, and shortly after having captured Moscow he set down the regulations governing the Comédie-Française. No detail about his empire was too minute for his restless, questing energy. The prefect of a department would be instructed to stop taking his young mistress to the opera; an obscure country priest would be reprimanded for giving a bad sermon on his birthday; a corporal told he was drinking too much; a demi-brigade that it could stitch the words ‘Les Incomparables’ in gold onto its standard. He was one of the most unrelenting micromanagers in history, but this obsession with details did not prevent him from radically transforming the physical, legal, political and cultural landscape of Europe.
More books have been written with Napoleon in the title than there have been days since his death in 1821. Admittedly, many have titles like Napoleon’s Haemorrhoids and Napoleon’s Buttons, but there are several thousand comprehensive, cradle-to-grave biographies too. Every one of them published since 1857 relied upon the correspondence that Napoleon III published as a tribute to his uncle. We now know that this was shamefully bowdlerized and distorted for propaganda purposes: letters that Napoleon never wrote were included while embarrassing or compromising ones that he did write were passed over. In all the compendium included only two-thirds of his total output.
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