Napoleon the Great

by Andrew Roberts

  Ancient history was well represented, of course, and the list included a very recent edition of Cornelius Nepos’ Vies des grands capitaines, a book he had first read over forty years earlier. By the time he went to St Helena, Napoleon could be certain that it would be impossible to write a modern book entitled Lives of the Great Captains without including a chapter on him too. The ambition he had conceived as a schoolboy at Brienne, and from which he had never wavered, had been achieved. He had transformed the art of leadership, built an empire, handed down laws for the ages, and joined the ancients.

  Conclusion

  Napoleon the Great

  ‘The greatest man of action born in Europe since Julius Caesar.’

  Winston Churchill on Napoleon

  ‘He was at one and the same time a man of great genius and great audacity.’

  Napoleon on Julius Caesar

  ‘SPIRIT SINISTER: “… My argument is that War makes rattling good history; but Peace is poor reading. So I back Bonaparte for the reason that he will give pleasure to posterity.” ’

  Thomas Hardy, The Dynasts

  What wins a ruler the soubriquet ‘the Great’? Alexander, Alfred, Charles, Peter, Frederick and Catherine were all huge figures who decisively influenced the history of their times. Yet it is not difficult to think of others who were equally influential or striking, and indeed often rather better human beings (at least by modern standards), who have not been so called. Frederick Barbarossa, Henry II and Elizabeth I of England, Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain, the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V (who ruled more of Europe than anyone else between Charlemagne and Napoleon), ‘the Sun King’ Louis XIV, and so on.* Why does the subject of this book so deserve it?

  Napoleon Bonaparte was the founder of modern France and gave his name to an age. He came to power through a military coup only six years after entering the country as a virtually penniless political refugee, and was defined for the rest of his life above all by the fact that he was an army officer. Much has been written about his Corsicanness, his origins in the petit noblesse, his absorption of the ideas of the Enlightenment, and his inspiration by the ancient world, but the years he spent in military schooling at Brienne and the École Militaire affected him even more than any of these, and it was from the ethos of the Army that he took most of his beliefs and assumptions. The army imbued him with a strong belief in the importance of applied intelligence, hierarchy based on merit, law and order, hard work, mental toughness and physical courage, as well as a contempt for self-serving lawyers and politicians. Despite being technically a noble, the Revolution saw him accept enthusiastically its early principles of equality before the law, rational government, meritocracy and aggressive nationalism: all those ideas fitted in well with his assumptions about what would work well for the French Army. By contrast, equality of outcome, social disorder, parliamentarianism, and liberty of the press (which he saw as licence encouraging sedition) all struck him as at odds with the military ethic. Even in his own short Jacobin phase he never espoused egalitarianism. It was very much as a French army officer imbued with the military ethos that he rose, demonstrated his usefulness to the Revolution, seized power and then maintained his rule.

  Any general – which Napoleon became at the age of twenty-four – must ultimately be judged by the outcome of his battles. Although his conquests ended in defeat and ignominious imprisonment, over the course of his short but packed military life Napoleon fought sixty battles and sieges and lost only seven – Acre, Aspern-Essling, Leipzig, La Rothière, Lâon, Arcis and Waterloo. Napoleon’s feeling for battle, and capacity for battlefield decision-making, was extraordinary. Walking the ground of fifty-three of his sixty battlefields, I was regularly astounded by his instinctive feeling for topography, his acuity in judging distance and choosing ground, his sense of timing. ‘There is a moment in combat when the slightest manoeuvre is decisive and gives superiority,’ he once wrote. ‘It is the drop of water that starts the overflow.’1 He certainly never lacked confidence in his own capacity as a military leader. On St Helena, when asked why he had not taken Frederick the Great’s sword when he had visited Sanssouci, he replied, ‘Because I had my own.’ (In fact, he did take Frederick’s sword back to Les Invalides.)

  Since France’s defeat in the Seven Years War, not least by Frederick’s sword, much important thinking had been done by her military strategists and theorists about how she could improve each of the three arms of infantry, cavalry and artillery and how they could be coordinated to far better effect. Napoleon studied deeply the works of Guibert, Gribeauval, Bourcet, Marshal de Saxe and others, and put their ideas to practical use on the battlefield. He did not invent concepts such as the battalion carré, the strategy of the central position, the ordre mixte, the manoeuvre sur les derrières or even the Corps system, but he did perfect them. They allowed him to fight every kind of military engagement and turn almost any situation to his advantage. In the Italian campaign of 1796–7 alone, he continually pinned the enemy in place while turning one or other of their flanks – the right at Montenotte, the left at Rovereto, or sometimes both simultaneously as at Mondovi. He was superb at inspiring his men to attack across narrow bridges such as at Lodi and Arcole, at intuiting situations from intelligence reports as before Marengo, at pursuing a retreating enemy such as at Millesimo at Primolano. He checked an enemy offensive to his rear at Lonato and Rivoli and counterattacked successfully on both occasions. At Castiglione he trapped the enemy between two armies and took them from the rear. It takes a virtuoso to excel in every different type of tactical situation imaginable in one campaign, and Napoleon was to repeat such performances for nearly twenty years; indeed some of his best generalship was in the 1814 campaign in Champagne, when he won four separate battles in five days.

  The Revolutionary armies of the levée en masse were not only very large by previous standards, but were fired by patriotic fervour. Once he proclaimed himself emperor he recognized that it would take something beyond mere republican virtue to create the vital esprit de corps necessary to inflame his troops, so with his proclamations, inspirational harangues, Orders of the Day and above all the creation of the Légion d’Honneur he appealed to the concept of soldierly honour to light what he called the ‘sacred fire’ of martial valour.2 Napoleon managed to incorporate elements from both the Ancien Régime and the Revolutionary armies to create a new military culture motivated by honour, patriotism and a fierce personal devotion to himself which took his troops across the sands of Egypt, the great rivers of Europe and, ultimately disastrously, the frozen wastes of Russia.

  In the five years of peace between Marengo and the Austerlitz campaign, Napoleon taught his armies manoeuvres that he was able to put to superb effect in the many campaigns thereafter. Although because of the Royal Navy he never got his opportunity to invade Britain with the Army of England stationed at Boulogne, by the time it broke camp to march eastwards after three years in continuous training it was disciplined to perfection. And unlike eighteenth-century armies, which moved in a stately manner with large baggage trains and requisitioned what they needed on campaign, the Revolutionary and later Napoleonic armies lived off the land, dispersing (within strictly controlled limits) to do so and thus – when directed by a commander of Napoleon’s driving energy – able to move at an altogether different pace from their enemies. Nor did Napoleon slow himself down by besieging cities, recognizing that modern wars – his wars – would be won by lightning strokes against the main enemy in the field. His understanding of topography and mathematics allowed him to use artillery to maximum effect too, at Toulon, Jena, Wagram, Montereau and many others. He remained cool and analytical – sometimes even jocular as at Rivoli and Wagram – even when he seemed to be on the verge of defeat. What to other commanders might seem like potential disasters he took to be opportunities. When, for example, he had to fight at the end of highly extended lines of communications, as at Austerlitz and Friedland (though not at Borodino), the exposure of his strategic position
seemed to inspire him to greater daring on the battlefield. Another important aspect of Napoleon’s generalship was his ability to retain the initiative. Of his sixty battles, only five – the Pyramids, Marengo, Aspern-Essling, Leipzig and La Rothière – were defensive; the rest were fought offensively.

  Above all, Napoleon was fast. It was a personal characteristic: we have seen how he moved from Dresden to Saint-Cloud in four days in July 1807, from Paris to Erfurt in five days in September 1808, from Valladolid to Paris in six days in January 1809. It was the same for his armies across Europe and on the battlefield: the Army of England struck its tents in Boulogne on August 29, 1805 and by October 5 was beginning to surround Mack in Ulm on the Danube. Soult’s corps had covered 400 miles in twenty marching days, Davout’s 370 miles without a full day’s halt, and both came in without having lost a man through desertion or sickness. ‘Activité, activité, vitesse!’ he wrote to Masséna in April 1809, and there was no more characteristic Napoleonic command. It was only when he had too large an army personally to be able to oversee its every aspect, as in Russia in 1812, that it became lumbering and incapable of the wide encircling manoeuvres that had brought him victory in earlier years. Nor did he recognize how much his enemies had learnt from him: the deep-seated military reforms instituted by Archduke Charles in Austria, Barclay de Tolly in Russia and von Scharnhorst in Prussia were a tribute to him and his way of waging war; but they were also a danger that he failed to appreciate until it was too late. By 1812 every army in Europe had adopted his Corps system, and innovations that had given Napoleon’s armies their early advantages had been copied and sometimes even improved upon.

  In another vital area Napoleon suffered from an almost total lacuna: the sea. Despite having been born in a seaport, he never understood naval manoeuvres, and even after the disaster at Trafalgar he still believed that he could build an invasion fleet that would one day humiliate Britain, devoting far too much money, men and materiel to that utterly doomed enterprise. On land, however, he was a genuine military genius. Small wonder that when asked who was the greatest captain of the age, the Duke of Wellington himself replied: ‘In this age, in past ages, in any age: Napoleon.’3

  Yet even if he had not been one of the great conquerors, Napoleon would still be one of the giants of modern history, for his civil achievements equalled his military ones, and far outlasted them. Although the Terror had ended in July 1794, the Jacobins remained powerful: but from the moment he cut them and the other Vendémiaire insurrectionists down with grapeshot in the streets of Paris in October 1795 they were eclipsed as a political force. After the Terror, and the decadence and disorder of the Directory, the majority of Frenchmen wanted a conservative Republic, and they got one from a man whose ideal society looked like merely a much larger version of the Army, led politically as well as militarily by its commander-in-chief. ‘We have done with the romance of the Revolution,’ the First Consul told an early meeting of his Conseil d’État, ‘we must now begin its history.’4 In many respects, he was the last and greatest of the enlightened authoritarians of eighteenth-century Europe who had begun to introduce rationalism to government and improvement to the lives of their subjects. Goethe said that Napoleon was ‘always enlightened by reason … He was in a permanent state of enlightenment’.5 He was the Enlightenment on horseback.

  In 1804 he was proclaimed ‘Emperor of the French Republic’, apparently a contradiction in terms, but in fact a true characterization of the nature of his rule. Napoleon consciously built upon and protected the best aspects of the French Revolution – equality before the law, rational government, meritocracy – while discarding the unsustainable revolutionary calendar of ten-day weeks, the absurd Cult of the Supreme Being, and the corruption, cronyism and hyper-inflation that characterized the dying days of the Republic. During his sixteen years in power, many of the best ideas that underpin and actuate modern democratic politics – meritocracy, equality before the law, property rights, religious toleration, secular education, sound finances, efficient administration, and so on – were rescued from the Revolutionary maelstrom and protected, codified and consolidated. Like much of the rest of Europe of the day, Napoleon’s regime employed press censorship and a secret police who established a relatively efficient surveillance system. The plebiscites he held seemingly to give the French people a political voice were regularly rigged. But the approval they gave, if exaggerated, was real. Napoleon was no totalitarian dictator, and had no interest in controlling every aspect of his subjects’ lives. In exercising an exceptional degree of power he was not vicious or vindictive, driven by the Corsican mores of vendetta. If he had been, men who kept betraying him such as Fouché, Murat and Talleyrand would hardly have been tolerated for as long as they were. We can count on the fingers of one hand the number of people Napoleon executed for political reasons – d’Enghien, Palm, Hofer, possibly Pichegru, effectively L’Ouverture – though this is not to excuse his massacre of Turkish prisoners at Jaffa or his responsibility for the attempted re-subjugation of Saint-Domingue, both of which surely had racial elements in their cruelty (although he was not present in the latter campaign). He did at one point re-introduce slavery in the French West Indies, but he finally abolished it throughout the French colonies in 1815.

  Though France was forced back to its pre-Napoleonic frontiers by the end of 1815, most of Napoleon’s refashioning of the country was sufficiently well embedded by then that it could not be reversed by the Bourbons when they returned to power. As a result, many of his civil reforms stayed in place for decades, even centuries. The Napoleonic Code forms the basis of much of European law today, while various aspects of it have been adopted by forty countries on all five inhabited continents. His bridges span the Seine and his reservoirs, canals and sewers are still in use; France’s foreign ministry rests on top of part of the 2½ miles of stone quays he built along the river, and the Cour des Comptes still checks public spending accounts more than two centuries after he founded it. The lycées continue to provide excellent education, and the Conseil d’État still meets every Wednesday to review the proposed laws of France. The ‘masses of granite’ that Napoleon boasted of throwing down to anchor French society are there to this day. When Napoleon’s mother was complimented on her son’s achievements, she replied: ‘Mais pourvu que ça dure!’6 They have.

  In 1792, France became a crusading nation, determined to export the values and ideals of the Revolution to the rest of Europe. Europe’s monarchs would have none of it, and formed the first of seven coalitions to resist the encroachments. It was these wars that Napoleon inherited and, through his military capacity, for a time took to a triumphant conclusion. In Britain, which had already had its political revolution 140 years earlier and thus enjoyed many of the benefits that the Revolution brought to France, Napoleon’s threat first to invade and then economically to strangle her into submission ensured that successive governments were unsurprisingly determined to overthrow him. The ruling dynasties of Austria, Prussia and Russia were equally unsurprisingly resistant to his offers of peace on French terms. As a consequence, war was declared on him far more often than he declared it on others: by the Austrians in 1800, by the British in 1803, by the Austrians’ invading his ally Bavaria in 1805, by the Prussians in 1806 and by the Austrians in 1809. The attacks on Portugal and Spain in 1807 and 1808 and Russia in 1812 were indeed initiated by Napoleon to try to enforce the Continental System – although as we have seen, the Tsar was planning an attack on him in 1812 – but the hostilities of 1813, and those of 1814 and 1815, were all declared on him. He made peace offers before all of them; indeed he made no fewer than four separate offers to Britain between the collapse of Amiens in 1803 and 1812. The Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars cost a total of around three million military and one million civilian deaths, of whom 1.4 million were French (916,000 from the Empire period, of whom fewer than 90,000 were killed in action).7* Napoleon must of course take much of the responsibility for these deaths – ‘If one thinks of
humanity, and only of humanity,’ he said, ‘one should give up going to war. I don’t know how war is to be conducted on the rosewater plan’ – but he cannot be accused of being the only, or even the principal, warmonger of the age. France and Britain were at war for nearly half the period between the Glorious Revolution in 1688 and Waterloo in 1815, and he was only a second lieutenant when the Revolutionary Wars broke out.

  ‘There are two ways of constructing an international order,’ wrote Henry Kissinger about post-Napoleonic Europe, ‘by will or by renunciation; by conquest or by legitimacy.’8 Only the way of will and conquest was open to Napoleon, and he followed it. He boasted that he was ‘of the race that founds empires’, but knew perfectly well, as we repeatedly saw in Part Three, that the legitimacy of his regime depended on the maintenance of French power in Europe, on what he called his honour and the honour of France. Although by 1810 or 1812 his power was great, he knew that his conquests had not yet had sufficient time to legitimize his rule. Some distinguished historians have concluded that the Napoleonic Empire simply could not have survived because it was colonialist in nature, and one European people could not dominate another for long: yet the Turks ruled over Greece for 363 years, the Spanish ruled Holland for 158 and the Austrians ruled Northern Italy and Holland for 80. ‘Chemists have a species of powder out of which they can make marble,’ he said, ‘but it must have time to become solid.’9 Had he not made a few crucial military mistakes, Napoleonic Europe might well have stabilized, bordered by the Neimen at one end and the English Channel at the other, with Austria as a reluctantly allied power and Prussia a crushed client state, and Napoleon’s civil reforms might then have become entrenched outside France too. But from 1810 onwards, the monarchs of Ancien Régime Europe (sinuously guided by Metternich, secretly encouraged by Talleyrand and financed by Castlereagh) strained every resource to be rid of him.* After he had gone, the Legitimist regimes reimposed a far more reactionary form of rule which was eventually overwhelmed by the nationalism to which the Revolution had given birth. Who is to say that a Europe dominated in the nineteenth century by an enlightened France would have been worse than the one that eventually transpired, in which Prussia dominated Germany and then forced itself onto the continent in ways far less benign than Napoleon?