Napoleon

by Andrew Roberts

  Since the Second World War, two generations of historians have seen Napoleon through the utterly distorting prism of the Führer, portraying him as a kind of proto-Hitler whose secret police, press censorship, aggressive foreign policy and desire for a new European order all presaged the horrors unleashed by the Nazis. British historians whose world view was established during the war have had immense influence on the way Napoleon is viewed today, and French and American historians have all too often followed suit. Claude Ribbe’s book Le Crime de Napoléon portrays him as a genocidal dictator on a par with Hitler, and the American historian Paul Schroeder compares the two men’s quests for power to Napoleon’s detriment: ‘Hitler did it for the sake of an unbelievably horrible ideal; Napoleon for no underlying purpose at all.’

  When I was a schoolboy in Britain in the 1970s, I was taught this negative view of Napoleon, but never really believed it. If he was so evil, I wondered, how was it that he had such a great sense of humour? If he was so ruthless in pursuing Corsican-style vendettas, why didn’t he punish the men who kept on betraying him? If he was such an inveterate warmonger, how was it that twice as many wars were declared on him than he had declared on others? If he was really pursuing continental, or even world, domination, why did he split Europe with Tsar Alexander I at the peace of Tilsit? If he was such a beast, why did so many of the people closest to him write admiring memorials even long after he was dead? If he was Hitler-in-the-making, why did so many intelligent and liberal-minded Britons visit him in Paris, on Elba and at St Helena?

  Researching for this book, which has taken me longer than Napoleon spent on Elba and St Helena put together, gave me the answers to questions I have been asking myself ever since my parents gave me Correlli Barnett’s biography Bonaparte when I was ten years old. Today that book sits in my study alongside a lock of Napoleon’s hair, a commiseration letter from him to a lady widowed at the battle of the Nile, various medals struck during the Consulate and a piece of the wallpaper from the room in which he died at Longwood House. ‘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.

  Napoleon’s legacy is one of the most fiercely debated in all of modern historiography and was even before the publication in 1945 of the Dutch historian Pieter Geyl’s masterwork Napoleon: For and Against. Geyl, who had been incarcerated in Buchenwald concentration camp during the Second World War, gave lectures there which drew comparisons between Napoleon and Adolf Hitler; he noted that ‘the parallel roused the keenest interest and amusement.’ He believed there was ‘an unmistakeable relationship’ between the two dictators. I profoundly disagree.

  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.

  PART ONE

  Rise

  1

  Corsica

  ‘The hero of a tragedy, in order to interest us, should be neither wholly guilty nor wholly innocent . . . All weakness and all contradictions are unhappily in the heart of man, and present a colouring eminently tragic.’

  Napoleon, on François-Just-Marie Raynouard’s play The Templars

  ‘The reading of history very soon made me feel that I was capable of achieving as much as the men who are placed in the highest ranks of our annals.’

  Napoleon to the Marquis de Caulaincourt

  Napoleone di Buonaparte, as he signed himself until manhood, was born in Ajaccio, one of the larger towns on the Mediterranean island of Corsica, just before noon on Tuesday, August 15, 1769. ‘She was on her way home from church when she felt labour pains,’ he would later say of his mother, Letizia, ‘and had only time to get into the house, when I was born, not on a bed, but on a heap of tapestry.’1 The name his parents chose was unusual but not unknown, appearing in Machiavelli’s history of Florence, and, more immediately, being the name of one of his great-uncles.

  The Buona Parte family were originally landowners living between Florence and Livorno – a Florentine first took the surname in 1261. While the senior line remained in Italy, Francesco Buonaparte emigrated to Corsica in 1529, where for the next two and a half centuries his descendants generally pursued the gentlemanly callings of the law, academia and the Church.2 By the time of Napoleon’s birth the family occupied that social penumbra encompassing the haute bourgeoisie and the very minor nobility.

  After he came to power in France, when people attempted to trace his family’s descent from the thirteenth-century emperors of Trebizond, Napoleon told them that his dynasty in fact dated back only to the time of his military coup d’état. ‘There are genealogists who would date my family from the Flood,’ he told the Austrian diplomat Prince Clemens von Metternich, ‘and there are people who pretend that I am of plebeian birth. The truth lies between these two. The Bonapartes are a good Corsican family, little known for we have hardly ever left the island, but much better than many of the coxcombs who take it upon themselves to vilify us.’3 On the rare occasions when he discussed his Italian ancestry, he would say he was an heir to the Ancient Romans. ‘I am of the race that founds empires,’ he once boasted.4

  The family was far from rich, but it owned enough land for Napoleon’s great-uncle Luciano, the archdeacon of Ajaccio, to boast that the Bonapartes never had to buy their wine, bread or olive oil. One can still see the millstone used for grinding flour in the basement of the large, three-storey Casa Bonaparte on the rue Saint-Charles in Ajaccio, where his family had lived since 1682. Napoleon’s parents had another home in the countryside, some property in at least three other towns, a flock of sheep and a vineyard and employed a nanny, maid and cook. ‘There’s no wealth in Corsica,’ Napoleon’s elder brother Joseph wrote years later, ‘and the richer individuals hardly have 20,000 livres of savings; but, because everything is relative, our wealth was one of the most considerable in Ajaccio.’ The young Napoleon agreed, adding that ‘Luxury is an unwholesome thing in Corsica.’5

  In 1765, four years before Napoleon’s birth, the Scottish lawyer and man of letters James Boswell visited the island and was enchanted with what he found. ‘Ajaccio is the prettiest town in Corsica,’ he later wrote. ‘It hath many very handsome streets, and beautiful gardens, and a palace for the Genoese governor. The inhabitants of this town are the genteelest people in the island, having had a good deal of intercourse with the French.’ Three years later these people – some 140,000 in total, most of them peasants – were to experience considerably more intercourse with the French, who numbered around 28 million, than most had ever hoped for or wanted.

  The Italian city-state of Genoa had nominally ruled Corsica for over two centuries, but rarely tried to extend her control beyond the coastal towns into the mountainous interi
or, where the Corsicans were fiercely independent. In 1755 Corsica’s charismatic nationalist leader, Pasquale Paoli, proclaimed an independent republic, a notion that became a reality after he won the battle of Pedicoste in 1763. The man the Corsicans nicknamed Il Babbù (Daddy) quickly set about reforming the island’s financial, legal and educational systems, built roads, started a printing press and brought something approaching harmony between the island’s competing clans of powerful families. The young Napoleon grew up revering Paoli as a lawgiver, reformer and genuinely benevolent dictator.

  Genoa had no appetite for the fight that she knew would be required to reassert her authority over Corsica, and reluctantly sold the island to King Louis XV of France for 40 million francs in January 1768. The French foreign minister, the Duc de Choiseul, appointed the Corsican Matteo Buttafuoco to rule the island. Paoli naturally opposed this, so the French sent a force of 30,000 men under the command of the harsh Comte de Vaux with the task of putting down the rebellion and soon replaced Buttafuoco with a Frenchman, the Comte de Marbeuf.

  Carlo Bonaparte, Napoleon’s father, and his pretty young wife Letizia supported Paoli and were campaigning in the mountains when Letizia became pregnant with Napoleon. Carlo acted as Paoli’s private secretary and aide-de-camp, but when Vaux smashed the Corsican forces at the battle of Ponte Nuovo on May 8, 1769, Carlo and the by now heavily pregnant Letizia refused to go into exile with Paoli and 340 other irreconcilables.6 Instead, at a meeting between Marbeuf and the Corsican gentry, Carlo took an oath of loyalty to Louis XV, as a result of which he was able to retain his positions of responsibility on the island: assessor of the Ajaccio court of justice and superintendent of the island’s forestry school. Within two months of Ponte Nuovo, Carlo had dined with the Comte de Vaux, something that was held against him by his former compatriots whose resistance to French rule continued. Hundreds would die over the next two decades in sporadic anti-French guerrilla actions, although major incidents were rare after the mid-1770s.7 ‘He became a good Frenchman,’ Joseph Bonaparte wrote of their father, ‘seeing the huge advantages his country was taking from its union with France.’8 Carlo was appointed to represent the Corsican nobility in Paris in 1777, a position that saw him visit Louis XVI at Versailles twice.

  It is often alleged that Napoleon, who proclaimed a fierce Corsican nationalism throughout his adolescence, despised his father for switching his loyalties, but there is no proof of this beyond the bitter outpourings of his classmate and private secretary Louis Antoine de Bourrienne, whom he twice had to dismiss for gross peculation. In 1789 Napoleon did write to Paoli denouncing those Corsicans who had changed sides, but he didn’t refer to his by-then-deceased father. He chose to call his son Charles, which he would hardly have done if he had imagined his father as a quisling. The Bonapartes were a thrusting, striving, close-knit family of what Napoleon later called petits gentilshommes, and understood that no good would have come of being caught on the wrong side of history.

  French rule over Corsica turned out to be relatively light-handed. Marbeuf sought to persuade the island’s elite of the benefits of French rule, and Carlo was to be one of the prime beneficiaries. If Paoli was Napoleon’s early role model for statesmanship, Carlo personified precisely the kind of non-Frenchman whose willingness to collaborate with France was later vital to the smooth running of the Napoleonic Empire.

  • • •

  Carlo was tall, handsome, popular and a fine horseman. He spoke French well, was familiar with the Enlightenment thought of Locke, Montesquieu, Hume, Rousseau and Hobbes, and wrote Voltairean essays sceptical of organized religion for private distribution.9 Napoleon later described him as ‘a spendthrift’, and he certainly got through more than the patchy income he earned, building up debts for the family.10 He was a loving father, but weak, often impecunious and somewhat frivolous. Napoleon inherited little from him beyond his debts, his blue-grey eyes, and the disease that would lead them to their early deaths. ‘To my mother’, he would say, ‘I owe my fortune and all I’ve done that’s worthwhile.’11

  Maria-Letizia Ramolino, as she had been christened, was an attractive, strong-willed, wholly uneducated woman from a good family – her father was Ajaccio’s governor and subsequently Corsica’s inspector of roads and bridges. Her marriage to Carlo Buonaparte on June 2, 1764, when he was eighteen, was arranged by their parents. (The burning of Ajaccio’s archives during the French Revolution leaves her exact age unclear.) They didn’t marry in the cathedral as Carlo regarded himself as a secularized Enlightenment man, although Archdeacon Luciano later altered the church records to record a nuptial Mass there, an early indication of the Bonapartes’ willingness to doctor official records.12 Letizia’s dowry was valued at an impressive 175,000 francs, which included ‘a kiln and the house adjoining’, an apartment, a vineyard and 8 acres of land. This trumped the love that the raffish Carlo is believed to have felt for another woman at the time of his wedding.13

  Letizia had thirteen children between 1765 and 1786, eight of whom survived infancy, a not untypical ratio for the day; they were eventually to number an emperor, three kings, a queen and two sovereign princesses. Although Napoleon didn’t much like it when his mother beat him for being naughty – on one occasion for mimicking his grandmother – corporal punishment was normal practice in those days and he only ever spoke of her with genuine love and admiration. ‘My mother was a superb woman, a woman of ability and courage,’ he told General Gourgaud, near the end of his life. ‘Her tenderness was severe; here was the head of a man on the body of a woman.’ This, from Napoleon, was high praise. ‘She was a matriarch,’ he added. ‘She had plenty of brains!’14 Once he came to power, Napoleon was generous to his mother, buying her the Château de Pont on the Seine and giving her an annual income of 1 million francs, most of which she squirrelled away. When she was teased for her notorious parsimoniousness she replied: ‘Who knows, one day I may have to find bread for all these kings I’ve borne.’15

  Two children died in infancy before Napoleon was born, and the girl who came immediately after him, Maria-Anna, lived to only five. His elder brother, Giuseppe (who later Frenchified his name as Joseph), was born in January 1768. After Napoleon came Luciano (Lucien) in March 1775, a sister Maria-Anna (Elisa) in January 1777, Louis – significantly, the name of the kings of France – in September 1778, Maria-Paola (Pauline) in October 1780, Maria-Annunziata (Caroline) in March 1782, and Girolamo (Jérôme) in November 1784. Letizia stopped having children at thirty-three when Carlo died at thirty-eight, but Napoleon speculated that if his father had lived longer she would have had twenty.16

  One of the features that emerges strongly from Napoleon’s correspondence is his deep and constant concern for his family. Whether it was his mother’s property on Corsica, the education of his brothers or the marriage prospects of his sisters, he was endlessly seeking to protect and promote the Bonaparte clan. ‘You are the only man on earth for whom I have a true and constant love’, he once wrote to his brother Joseph.17 His persistent tendency to promote his family would later significantly damage his own interests.

  Napoleon’s background as a Corsican of Italian extraction later invited endless abuse from detractors. One of his earliest British biographers, William Burdon, said of his Italian ancestry: ‘To this may be attributed the dark ferocity of his character, which partakes more of Italian treachery than of French openness and vivacity.’18 Similarly, in November 1800 the British journalist William Cobbett described Napoleon as ‘a low-bred upstart from the contemptible island of Corsica!’ When the French senate proposed that Napoleon become emperor in 1804, the Comte Jean-Denis Lanjuinais expostulated: ‘What! Will you submit to give your country a master taken from a race of origin so ignominious that the Romans disdained to employ them as slaves?’19 Because he was Corsican it was assumed that Napoleon would pursue vendettas, but there is no record of the Bonapartes doing so, and Napoleon was notably lenient towards several people who betrayed him, s
uch as his foreign minister Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand and police minister Joseph Fouché.

  • • •

  Napoleon suffered from a hacking cough as a child that might have been a mild bout of undiagnosed tuberculosis; in his post-mortem his left lung showed evidence of it, long-healed.20 Yet the popular image of a frail introvert hardly squares with his family nickname of ‘Rabulione’, or troublemaker. Given the paucity of trustworthy sources, much of Napoleon’s early childhood must remain conjectural, but there is little doubt that he was a precocious and prodigious reader, drawn at an early age to history and biography. Letizia told a government minister that her son ‘had never partaken of the amusements of children his own age, that he carefully avoided them, that he found himself a little room on the third floor of the house in which he stayed by himself and didn’t come down very often, even to eat with his family. Up there, he read constantly, especially history books.’21 Napoleon claimed that he first read Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s La Nouvelle Héloïse, an 800-page novel of love and redemption, at the age of nine, and said ‘It turned my head.’22

  ‘I do not doubt the very powerful action of his early readings on the inclination and character of his youth,’ his brother Joseph later recalled.23 He described how, at their primary school, when the students were instructed to sit under either the Roman or the Carthaginian flag, Napoleon insisted that they swap places and utterly refused to join the losing Carthaginians.24 (Though he was eighteen months younger than Joseph, Napoleon was always stronger-willed.) Later in life, Napoleon urged his junior officers ‘to read and re-read the campaigns of Alexander the Great, Hannibal, Julius Caesar, Gustavus Adolfus, Prince Eugene and Frederick the Great. This is the only way to become a great captain.’25 Ancient history provided him with an encyclopaedia of military and political tactics and quotations that he would draw on throughout his life. This inspiration was so profound that when posing for paintings he would sometimes put his hand into his waistcoat in imitation of the toga-wearing Romans.