Napoleon the Great

by Andrew Roberts

  * As usual Napoleon was intensely active in micro-managing his Empire at the same time as following the international situation. ‘Yesterday, apparently, a coachman caused an accident that killed a little child,’ he wrote to Fouché on July 16. ‘Have him arrested, whomever he may belong to, and severely punished’ (CG6 no. 12507 p. 616).

  * When the Scottish poet Thomas Campbell proposed a toast to Napoleon at a literary dinner he was greeted with catcalls. ‘But, gentlemen,’ he cried out in his defence, ‘he once shot a publisher!’

  * One of them was an order to send the King of Sardinia’s coachman, whom he suspected of being a spy, to the Fenestrelle prison. The next day he wrote to Denon about the Louvre’s short opening hours, complaining, ‘The public had to wait. Nothing can be more contrary to my intentions’ (CG6 no. 13047 p. 900). He wrote 2,679 letters altogether in 1806.

  * A Napoleonstein (Napoleon stone) up on the Landgrafenberg above Jena cites the distances to various places that played a major part in Napoleon’s life. Thus it states that Jena is 700km from Paris, 2,838km from Cairo, 707km from Marengo, 1,657km from Madrid, 429km from Austerlitz, 1,683km from Borodino, 503km from Waterloo and no fewer than 7,626km from St Helena. It is a powerful reminder of the energy of the man who covered such distances in the horse-drawn, sailing-ship era in the seventeen years that separated the first of those journeys from the last.

  * Of the half of Russia’s 50 million population who were serfs, the Tsar levied a man-tax of 5 per cent, so his armies never had a manpower problem (Summerville, Napoleon’s Polish Gamble p. 19). The Russian ordinary soldiers – moujiks – were conscripted for twenty-five years, with no leave. Often illiterate, ill-fed, ill-lodged, ill-cared for and virtually unpaid, they nonetheless made excellent soldiers (Lieven, Russia Against Napoleon passim).

  * One small area where the Continental System did succeed was in denying the Royal Navy the north German timber it most liked to use, and forcing it to secure lesser woods from Africa and teak from the Malabar coast in south-west India, which the Admiralty disliked because, not being so fibrous, they splintered and thus caused higher casualties in battle (Albion, Forests and Sea Power passim, TLS 9/6/27 p. 399).

  * Count Alexander Ivanovich Ostermann-Tolstoy was a cousin of the author of War and Peace.

  * During the first three months of 1807, Napoleon wrote 1,715 letters, and over 3,000 in that calendar year, even more than in 1806. Half went to military figures, principally Clarke as governor-general of Prussia and the naval minister Decrès, and the rest were on diplomatic (more than two hundred to Talleyrand), administrative, family or personal matters. The subject of shoes and boots generated sixty-three letters, and sometimes caused confusion. ‘I got sent shoes when I asked for bread,’ Napoleon complained to Duroc in February. ‘What did I need nineteen barrels of shoes for, following the army around? This is madness’ (CG7 no. 14341 p. 207).

  * Napoleon took twenty-one or possibly twenty-two mistresses that we know of over the course of two decades. In total he bestowed the enormous sum of 480,000 francs on them between December 1804 and August 1813, with large amounts in his secret mistresses’ account book registered only as ‘given to His Majesty’.

  * It was not all haste, however. One night during the campaign, Napoleon had time to play cards with Berthier, Duroc and others, giving his Mamluk bodyguard Roustam 500 francs of his winnings (ed. Cottin, Souvenirs de Roustam pp. 140–41).

  * As the Russians didn’t capture it, there is speculation that it might be at the bottom of the lake. Thereafter Napoleon restricted eagles to first battalions only, and light cavalry was not allowed to carry them into battle at all (CG6 no. 13006 p. 879).

  * Those of the 10th Légère and the 18th, 24th, 44th and 51st Line.

  * Napoleon was deeply loathed by Maria Carolina of Naples, Maria Feodorovna of Russia, Louise of Prussia and Madame de Staël, who sensed his deeply misogynist attitude regarding women and power. ‘One finds it hard not to be indignant when one sees what this tart [catin] is capable of!’ he had written of Madame de Staël that April, ‘and ugly to boot!’ (CG7 no. 15337 p. 650).

  * The first British poet to be ennobled was Alfred Tennyson in 1884; the first artist was Frederic Leighton, the day before his death in 1896.

  † For all his genuine belief in meritocracy (except where his own family was concerned) Napoleon was not without snobbishness, telling Molé in 1813: ‘ “There are families which it is impossible to ennoble. How many colonels are brothers of ladies’ maids?” Molé replied that a member of Napoleon’s Conseil had a brother who was a Parisian street-sweeper’ (ed. Noailles, Count Molé p. 197). Napoleon did make Lefebvre Duke of Danzig – see p. 447 – despite the fact that his wife was a former regimental washerwoman. On being announced as the Duchess of Danzig at a reception, she winked at the footman and said: ‘Eh, boy, what do you think of that?!’ (Haythornthwaite, Final Verdict p. 231).

  * After Josephine took the aristocrat Lucie de La Tour du Pin around Malmaison, claiming how all the pictures and sculptures had been presents from foreign courts, du Pin noted: ‘The good woman was an inveterate liar. Even when the plain truth would have been more striking than an invention, she preferred to invent’ (Moorehead, Dancing to the Precipice p. 286).

  † A chamberlain recalled of Napoleon’s own snuff-taking that ‘he lost more than he took. It was rather a fancy, a kind of amusement, than a real want. His snuff boxes were very plain, of an oval shape, made of black shell, lined with gold, all exactly alike, and differing only in the beautiful antique silver medals which were set in the lid.’ (Bausset, Private Memoirs p. 428) Despite his snuff habit, Napoleon believed smoking to be ‘good for nothing but to enliven idlers’ (Constant, Memoirs II p. 11).

  ‡ These included the Tuileries, Fontainebleau, Saint-Cloud, Compiègne, the Grand Trianon and Petit Trianon at Versailles, Rambouillet (for hunting), Meudon, the Château de Marracq outside Bayonne, the Deutschhaus near Mainz, Laeken Palace near Brussels, the Palais Royal in Milan, the Pitti Palace in Florence, the Palazzo Durazzo in Genoa, the Castello Stupinigi in Turin and the Monte-Cavallo in Rome.

  * Despite his excessive spending, Napoleon was always on the lookout for economies, as we saw in his cutting of the upholsterer’s bills, p. 401. ‘155 cups of coffee were being drunk here per day,’ he once told a minister at the Tuileries, ‘each cup cost me 20 centimes, which came to 56,575 francs per year. I stopped the coffee and granted 7 francs and 6 centimes in compensation. I will pay 21,575 francs and will save 35,000 francs’ (Chaptal, Souvenirs p. 335).

  * First signed in 1376, the Anglo-Portuguese alliance is the oldest in the world and was reaffirmed in 1386, 1643, 1654, 1660, 1661, 1703 and 1815, by a secret declaration in 1899, then again in 1904 and 1914, and was cited by Britain during the Falklands War of 1982.

  * Two years later, Lucien was captured by the Royal Navy trying to flee to America, and spent several years in comfortable exile in Worcestershire writing unflattering poetry about ‘Charlemagne’ – that is, his brother.

  * Gibraltar had been ceded to Britain by the 1713 Treaty of Utrecht.

  * At Brooks’s Club in St James’s Street in London, on July 5 Humphrey Howarth MP wagered the 4th Earl of Cholmondeley 100 guineas to 25 ‘that Joseph Buonaparte is not at this period exercising sovereign authority in Madrid or its neighbourhood’ (Brooks’s Club Betting Book). The French were indeed in control there, although Joseph didn’t arrive until July 20.

  † Talleyrand did well out of the arrangement, as Ferdinand laid down carpets costing 200,000 francs, bought a hydraulic engine to supply the chateau with water and even paid for the vegetables he took from the kitchen garden (Kolli, Memoirs p. 3).

  * Yet even that didn’t end Napoleon’s naval plans, and very many of the letters he wrote to Decrès in 1808 covered different aspects of ship-building, the types of trees needed, their felling and transportation, the storage of timber, and so on. In July 1810 he wrote to Decrès of his plans to have a 110-ship navy by the e
nd of 1812 (ed. Bingham, Selection III p. 50).

  * Going over the details of the battle of Vimeiro with Thiébault five months afterwards, Thiébault was impressed by the way that Napoleon ‘laid his finger on most of the weak points in our disposition, and I was amazed to find that he really remembered the contents of my report better than I did myself’ (ed. Butler, Baron Thiébault II p. 238).

  * The other set was made for Josephine, but in 1818 Louis XVIII presented it to Wellington, and it can be seen today at Apsley House in London.

  * Napoleon’s well-thumbed copy of Goethe’s epistolary and loosely autobiographical novel The Sorrows of Young Werther, complete with the imperial coat of arms embossed in gold on the front and back, can today be seen in the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York. It has been read so often that the pages are barely attached to the binding. That edition was published in Paris in 1804, which suggests that Napoleon read the book regularly even after becoming emperor.

  * He was as diligent a correspondent as ever in 1809, writing 3,250 letters during the course of the year, including one to Fouché pointing out a discrepancy in his ministerial accounts of 1 franc and 45 centimes.

  * 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 ‘it 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’.

  * The Chappe telegraph system, named after its brother inventors, used movable beams with 196 different combinations, representing single letters or whole phrases, and could send messages relatively accurately at speeds of up to 250 miles a day. Napoleon extended the system enormously from its original use within France, sending it deep into Germany and Italy (eds. Olsen and van Creveld, Evolution of Operational Art p. 17).

  * Today it can be found around the back of the McDonald’s restaurant car park.

  * It wasn’t just his aides-de-camp who were rewarded. After the successful storming of Landshut Napoleon asked the colonel of the 13th Légère who had been the bravest man in the demi-brigade. The colonel hesitated, possibly thinking it invidious to pick any particular man, so Napoleon asked the officers, who also fell silent. Finally an elderly captain replied that it had been the drum-major. ‘You have been designated the bravest in a brave regiment,’ Napoleon told the drum-major, to cheers from the men, and he made him a chevalier in the Légion d’Honneur on the spot (ed. Haythornthwaite, Final Verdict p. 220).

  * Although Las Cases was not personally present he had plenty of opportunity to discuss it with Napoleon on St Helena.

  † That month 12,000 francs left his special account for mistresses, for ‘the Viennese adventures’, and a further 17,367 francs that September, when he was back at the palace with Marie after Wagram (Branda, Le prix de la gloire p. 57).

  * The tower which is there today was built after the battle.

  * In May 1812, when it was recognized that Royal Navy cruisers could get close enough to Savona to rescue the pontiff, he was taken to Fontainebleau Palace, where he lived in some luxury until his release in 1814. One can still see the rooms he occupied there. ‘The Pope must not travel in papal dress,’ Napoleon told Borghese with his typical eye for public opinion, ‘but only in clerical garments so that nowhere en route … can he be recognized.’ (CN12 no. 8710 p. 417)

  * One evening after Wagram, Napoleon and Rapp, who would tease him in a way few others were permitted, were playing vingt-et-un (pontoon or blackjack) for gold twenty-franc coins minted since 1803 and called napoleons, when the Emperor attempted a pun. ‘Rapp, are not the Germans very fond of these little napoleons?’ he asked. ‘Yes, Sire,’ Rapp replied. ‘They like them much better than the big one.’ ‘That, I suppose,’ laughed the Emperor, ‘is what you call German frankness’ (Rapp, Memoirs p. 26).

  † Napoleon not only dreaded madmen, but inspired them: at the time of his burial in Paris in December 1840 there were no fewer than fourteen patients at Bicêtre who believed they were him.

  * Charles had been on the throne only since March 1809, when the Swedish aristocracy had deposed his nephew King Gustav IV, yet another European monarch who suffered from imbecilism.

  * As ever, Napoleon was also busy on other fronts. ‘I have just seen the porcelain service sent to the Empress as a new year’s gift,’ he wrote to Champagny on December 31. ‘It is very ugly. See that it be prettier another year’ (ed. Bingham, Selection III p. 132).

  * Along with hundreds of orders concerning every aspect of his armies’ move east down to whether they had enough cooking pots and brandy flasks, Napoleon also sent the Comte de Montesquiou-Fezensac a ‘list of young people and young ladies who have been invited to balls’ in Paris, pointing out that ‘All the young ladies whose aunts or mothers have been invited can come. It would be unseemly to invite young ladies whose mothers have not been asked’ (CN23 no. 18482 p. 208).

  * Lithuania had been part of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth since 1569, before the Russians annexed it in the three partitions between 1772 and 1795.

  * After writing such an extraordinary, open-hearted letter, Napoleon was probably joking when he asked Balashov which was the best road to Moscow. ‘Sire,’ came the superb retort, ‘one can take whichever one wants. Charles XII went by way of Poltava.’ (Foord, Napoleon’s Russian Campaign p. 75, Mowat, Diplomacy of Napoleon p. 256)

  * As ever Napoleon was also thinking about what was happening in France. ‘I must remind you that I had the intention of buying all parts of the islands of Hyères,’ he told Clarke on July 21, referring to a small group of islands in the south of France, ‘and doing something to populate them’ (CG12 no. 31281 p. 899). He was also fearful that a large granary in Paris would not be built in the time he had allowed for it. ‘The Arc de Triomphe, the Pont d’Iéna, the Temple of Glory, the abattoirs can be delayed by two or three years without inconvenience,’ he told his minister for trade and commerce, ‘instead it is of the utmost importance that this enormous warehouse be finished.’ (CG12 no. 31255 p. 885)

  * That same week Napoleon’s secretary Méneval wrote to his librarian Barbier, ‘The Emperor would like to have some amusing books. If there were some good new novels, or older ones that he does not know, or memoirs that make agreeable reading, please be so kind as to send them to us, since we have moments of leisure here that are difficult to fill’ (CN24 no. 19052 p. 128). One book Napoleon claimed to be too busy to read was Laplace’s The Analytical Theory of Probabilities. ‘I received your treatise for the calculation of probabilities with pleasure,’ he wrote to the chancellor of the Senate. ‘There’ll be a time when I’ll read it with interest but today I must confine myself to showing you the satisfaction I feel whenever I see you produce new books that develop and expand this first among sciences. They contribute to the enlightenment of the nation. The advancement and perfection of mathematics are intimately connected with the prosperity of the State.’ (CG12 no. 31388 p. 949)

  * It was Vespasian.

  * Junot’s judgement might have been affected by the syphilis that was to drive him insane. At a ball at Ragusa the following year, he arrived stark naked except for his epaulettes, gloves, dancing shoes, orders and decorations (D’Abrantès, At the Court p. 21). He died in July 1813 as a result of gangrene setting into injuries sustained when jumping from a second-floor window under the impression that he could fly. (The surprise was that he could fit through, as he had taken to eating three hundred oysters a day.) (Strathearn, Napoleon in Egypt p. 422)

  * Overall the French fired 60,000 cannonballs and 1.4 million musket balls that day. Even if the Russians were firing at a lesser rate, and there is no indication that they were, an average of over three cannonballs and seventy-seven musket balls were therefore fired per second throughout the battle (Cate, War of the Two Emperors p. 235). A Russian aide-de-camp observed that while crossing the battlefield he
had to keep his mouth open in order to stabilize the percussive pressure on his ears.

  * The innumerable clocks were still ticking in the palace, but the Russians did put acid in some of the wine in the cellar, which ‘dreadfully burned’ the mouth of the Comte de Turenne’s valet (Merridale, Red Fortress p. 212, Bausset, Private Memoirs p. 328).