by Paul Johnson
The only other occasion when Bonaparte offered his sword as a mercenary was when, already trained and commissioned as an officer in the French army, but angry at slow promotion, he considered serving the sultan of Turkey, as many European officers did at that time. But an opportunity to serve France in higher rank came just in time, so this moment passed, too. Bonaparte was not by temperament a mercenary. But he was not a patriot, either. He was not moved by sentiment, secular or religious. If metaphysical forces played on him at all, he was a victim of superstition, though a willing one. He believed in his stars, like the ancient Romans he admired (insofar as he admired anyone). He felt he had a destiny, and most of his life he was confident in it. But, sure as he was of what destiny intended for him, he nonetheless was determined to wrest it from events with his own brain, arms, and will. In his material calculations, he was quite clear and consistent. He needed not a paymaster, like a mercenary, not a disembodied ideal, like a patriot, but a source of power, so that he could capture it and obtain more power. So he asked himself: Where does the nearest source of real power lie? And the answer came immediately: France.
Hence the significance of Bonaparte’s birthdate, which made him a subject of the French crown. And there was a further stroke of fortune. From 1772 to 1786, the virtual ruler of Corsica, or rather of the walled coastal cities, was a Breton nobleman, the comte de Marbeuf. He built up his own local party, which included Carlo Bonaparte. Carlo was almost penniless but he had his sixteen quarterings, so Marbeuf was able to send him to Versailles as a representative of the local nobility. He was away some time, and while so, Marbeuf, aged sixty but a lifelong womanizer, had a leisurely affair with Letizia (or so the evidence suggests). In return, he made use of a fund that, every year, awarded 600 places at high-class French schools to the children of poor French parents who could prove their noblesse. The family could do that, if nothing else, and on 31 December 1778, young Bonaparte, aged nine, was gazetted by the ministry of war with a place at a royal military school. His elder brother, Joseph, was similarly privileged, and Marbeuf arranged free places for both of them at a preparatory school at Autun.
Hence, at the end of the following year, Bonaparte and brother Joseph left for France, to learn French in the first instance, from there to be enveloped in the public service of the Bourbon monarchy. A year at Autun was followed by five years at the military college at Brienne and a year at the academy for officers in Paris. These seven years marked the transformation of Bonaparte into a professional French soldier. He was struck by two things. The first was the comparative luxury in which mere cadets lived, being privileged beneficiaries of the ancien régime. He cut all this out when he acquired a say in how the French army was run—all its components, officers included, had to acquire their comforts by their ability to win and their rapacity in securing the trophies of victory. Second, he realized how important it was to make use of his capacity for figures. This got him through the academy (forty-second out of fifty-eight) and a commission as a second lieutenant in the La Fère regiment of artillery, a good starting point for a subaltern without the money or influence needed to serve in smart guards or cavalry outfits. But, more important, Bonaparte began to pay constant attention to the role of calculation in war: distances to be covered; speed and route of march; quantities of supplies and animals, and the vehicles required for their transport; rates at which ammunition was used in varying engagements; replacement rates of men and animals; wastage figures from disease, battle, and desertion—all the elements of eighteenth-century military logistics. He made a habit of working these things out in his head, so that they could easily be dictated for orders. He also became a master map reader, with a gift amounting almost to genius for visualizing terrain from a two-dimensional, often fallible piece of engraved paper. Few young officers of his day had this skill, or bothered to acquire it. Asked how long it would take to get a siege train from the French fortress of Verdun to the outskirts of Vienna, most officers of the day would shrug bewildered shoulders or make a wild guess. Bonaparte would consult a map and give the answer in exact days and hours. This calculating approach to war made Bonaparte more than a tactician. He had the makings of a strategist—indeed, a geostrategist.
In the meantime he matured fast, reaching his full height of five feet five, pale, thin, saturnine, with lank dark hair over a broad brow. Not interested in food or drink, he ate his meals, if he had any choice in the matter, in ten minutes and never caroused. No one ever saw him drunk. He was not exactly a loner, because he liked to lay down the law to comrades. But he could be solitary and he made no lifelong friends at the college or the academy. Boyhood, even youth, fled swiftly. In February 1785, his father died of stomach cancer. Though still only fifteen and the second son, Bonaparte took over, by general consent, his father’s place as head of the family, in preference to the amiable but unassertive Joseph. A year older, Joseph (1768-1844) had decided to forgo a military career and to become a lawyer like his father. He was to be a willing but ineffectual tool in Bonaparte’s rise and fall. The next brother, Lucien (1775-1846), was more amenable to Bonaparte’s schemes, serving him as a soldier and later as king of Holland; but ill-health and lack of enthusiasm forced him to abdicate in 1810, when he faded from public life. The youngest brother, Jérôme (1784-1860), who most resembled Bonaparte in his vigor and enthusiasm, was rewarded with the kingdom of Westphalia and served in many of the great campaigns, including Russia and Waterloo, after which he went into exile until Louis’s son, later Napoleon III, restored the family fortunes in France. Of Bonaparte’s sisters, the eldest, Eliza (1777-1820), married a Corsican, Prince Bac ciochi, whom Bonaparte made prince of Piombino; but she left him soon after and was made grand duchess of Tuscany. Pauline (1781-1825) was the most beautiful of the girls and married in turn Bonaparte’s West Indian commander, Charles Leclerc, then the Roman prince, Camillo Borghese, in whose family palace Antonio Canova’s reclining, seminude statue of Pauline can still be seen. The youngest sister, Caroline (1782-1839), the most untrustworthy, married Bonaparte’s cavalry commander, Joachim Murat, and in due course the couple were made king and queen of Naples. It has to be said that Bonaparte did the best, according to his lights, for his siblings, provided they obeyed him. He showered on them and their spouses principalities and kingdoms, but all were lost, and all his siblings met misfortune or underwent long years in exile.
But at the time the sixteen-year-old Bonaparte took over direction of the family fortunes, all this was in the future and all were young. His father left virtually nothing. The youth’s pay was ninety-three livres a month, of which room and board took twenty. It was little more when he was promoted first lieutenant in 1791. His problem was to ensure that his mother’s widowhood was honorable and that his brothers and sisters did not starve. In the artillery parc at Valence, he tried to educate himself by intensive reading, as the young Winston Churchill was to do during his Indian service. He still wrote letters in Italian, though his French, grotesquely misspelled, was improving. He read Plato’s Republic; Buffon’s Histoire naturelle; Rousseau and Voltaire; James Macpherson’s Ossian works, those bibles of the early Romantics; various histories and biographies; and a volume, in English, of English history, which he read with particular attention, believing England to be a successful country, well worth studying for its secrets—though he never seems to have grasped the essence of the English constitution, then regarded as its chief virtue. He took copious notes, chiefly of statistics. But he read fiction, too, historical romances chiefly. He also wrote fiction, including a short story set in London in 1683, about Whig plotting against Charles II, in which macabre murders, reformist politics, and divine retribution are strangely mingled.
He also began, but never finished, a history of Corsica. He could not finish it because he kept changing his mind about what Corsica’s future should be. Before he died, Carlo Bonaparte broke with General Paoli and the cause of independence. Paoli never forgave the family, whom he classed as traitors and fo
reigners. In 1789, the new French National Assembly allowed Paoli, who had been in English exile, to return to Corsica. He at once set about organizing an independent republic there. Between September 1786 and June 1793, Bonaparte returned to Corsica four times: first as a moderate supporter of French power, in gratitude to Marbeuf; then as an open critic of an increasingly oppressive French regime, run from Paris; then as an outright supporter of Paoli and a colonel in the Corsican militia; finally as a critic and opponent of Paoli, who not only showed him no favor but exercised dictatorial powers and proposed to separate Corsica finally from France. At this point Bonaparte threw in his lot with the Corsican Jacobins. Civil war broke out on the island in April 1793. For Paoli, who had become increasingly suspicious of the young, swiftly rising soldier, with his French training and education, this was the end. He had the entire Bonaparte family publicly sentenced to “perpetual execration and infamy.” Thus indicted in a land where the vendetta ruled, all of them, the mother included, ran for safety to France, never to return.
Though it is clear Bonaparte had bitter memories of his native isle, and wished to erase it from his mind, it did provide him with something important: a map of the kind of power he sought. Though Paoli became his enemy, he remained in a sense Bonaparte’s hero-mentor. For Paoli was not a warlord, or at any rate not just a warlord, as all his predecessors in the struggle for independence had been. He was a man of the Enlightenment who believed—as did Jefferson, Adams, and Washington on the far side of the Atlantic; Burke and Fox in England; and Lafayette in France—that revolution and armed struggle were no more than the necessary prelude to creating a humanitarian republic endowed with an ideal constitution. He was the man Rousseau had been looking for to turn little Corsica into a model commonwealth, an example to all Europe for the wisdom of its laws. Paoli emerges from Boswell’s copious writing and much other evidence as noble, disinterested, fearless, and sensible; a man who had absorbed in exile British pragmatism and, like the Founding Fathers in America, blended it skillfully with the more abstract idealism of Rousseau, Diderot, and the encyclopédistes. He seized with both hands the opportunity to treat Corsica, as Rousseau had envisaged, as a tabula rasa on which could be inscribed a scheme of government and code of laws that would make it, though small and weak, a world exemplar. Alas, his sword was not strong enough to win and maintain Corsican independence alone, and his British ally deserted him, so that he, too, ended his life in exile.
But the archetype of Paoli, not just conquering soldier but supreme legislator and enlightened ruler as well, became part of the furniture of Bonaparte’s mind. He was already seeking power, but the fate of Corsica enabled him to give a purpose to power. Winning a battle, a campaign, a war, was not an end in itself but an opportunity to impose a new order on the old corrupt and inefficient systems. He was to be a Paoli for all Europe, built in an incomparably larger mold and operating on a continental, perhaps a world scale, for the better gover nance of mankind. He did not realize, and perhaps he never realized, that there was a fundamental contradiction in this vision. Whereas Paoli, acting on behalf of the Corsicans themselves, was a mere liberator who then legislated with their consent, Bonaparte, with his overarching scheme for Europe, was not so much a liberator as a conqueror, and the violence of the conquest was incompatible with the idealism planned for the subsequent government, which thus became mere occupation by force, unjust and cruel. Warfare, from being a means to an end, became an end in itself, and Bonaparte, having once unsheathed his sword, found it impossible to lay it down for long. He ended by being no nearer his goal, and no safer, than his last victory—thus inviting inevitable nemesis. All this seems clear enough to us now. But nothing was clear then, in the early 1790s, except that the world could be reorganized afresh—that all Europe was a tabula rasa—and that a bold soldier was exactly the man to write his destiny on it.
CHAPTER TWO
Revolutionary, General, Consul, Emperor
REVOLUTIONARY FRANCE of the 1790s provided the perfect background for an ambitious, politically conscious, and energetic soldier such as Bonaparte to make his way to the top. It demonstrated the classic parabola of revolution: a constitutional beginning; reformist moderation quickening into ever-increasing extremism; a descent into violence; a period of sheer terror, ended by a violent reaction; a time of confusion, cross-currents, and chaos, marked by growing exhaustion and disgust with change; and eventually an overwhelming demand for “a Man on Horseback” to restore order, regularity, and prosperity. Victor Hugo, a child of one of Bonaparte’s generals, was later to write: “Nothing is more powerful than an idea whose time has come.” It is equally true to say: “No one is more fortunate than a man whose time has come.” Bonaparte was thus favored by fortune and the timing of the parabola, and he compounded his luck by the alacrity and decision with which he snatched at opportunities as they arose.
Indeed, if there was one characteristic that epitomized Bonaparte throughout his rise and grandeur, it was opportunism. He was the opportunist incarnate. Few successful men have ever carried a lighter burden of ideology. He had no patriotism as such, for he had no country. Corsica had been barred to him. France was no more than a career structure and a source of power. He had no class feelings, for though legally an aristocrat, he had no land or money or title, and saw the existing system of privilege as a fraud and, more important, as a source of grotesque inefficiency. But he had no hatred for kings or nobles as such. Nor did he believe in democracy or rule by votes.
The people he observed with detachment: properly led, they could do remarkable things. Without sensible leadership, they were a dangerous rabble. He liked the vague and abstract notion of Rousseau’s concept the General Will, offering a ruling elite that knew its business the opportunity to harness the people to a national effort without any of the risks of democracy. In practice an elite always formed itself into a pyramid, with one man at its summit. His will expressed the General Will (an antidemocratic notion, in which a nation’s will was embodied by one man rather than by head counting) and gave it decisiveness, the basis for action. Constitutions were important in the sense that window dressing was important in a shop. But the will was the product to be sold to the nation and, once sold, imposed. If this be ideology, it was the ideology of an opportunist who could adapt himself to the phases of the revolutionary evolution, as they occurred, until his personal moment came. That was a matter for the stars, and the stars had no ideology, merely motion.
Bonaparte believed not in revolution but in change; perhaps accelerated evolution is the exact term. He wanted things to work better, or more fairly, and also faster. In England he would have been a utilitarian; in the United States, a federalist and a follower of Alexander Hamilton; in Austria, a supporter and goader-on of Joseph II, the archetype of the Enlightened Despot. Europe in the 1780s, spurred on by constitution making in America and by autocratic reform at home, was ripe for change. Virtually everyone wanted it. There was little opposition to it. In Denmark in the 1780s, for instance, prison and law reforms were carried through, poor relief established, land reform introduced, feudal labor services abolished, the slave trade outlawed, outmoded tariffs removed, and commerce liberated, all without the assistance of the mob and without a single riot or political execution. Rather more cautious changes were made in the Netherlands and parts of Germany. If Louis XVI had been more energetic and decisive, France could have followed the same pattern. The aristocracy was crowded with progressive reformers. The royal bureaucracy was keen on improvements. In every ministry, huge dossiers of desirable changes were compiled and plans prepared, most of which were later put through by revolutionaries who claimed credit for them. All that was missing was the decisive impulse from the top. And France, unlike Denmark, was tied to the chariot of its great power status—it referred to itself as “the Great Nation” and sought in the second half of the eighteenth century, almost as a duty, to engage in vastly expensive and increasingly unsuccessful wars to maintain its historical pos
ition as Europe’s leading country. So the 1780s were a struggle against bankruptcy, leading to financial juggling, arbitrary impositions, court desperation, and finally to the calling of the Estates General in 1789, for the first time in nearly two centuries. After that, the process of change spun out of control.
Bonaparte watched the earlier phases of the Revolution as an outsider who longed to be inside the decision-making process. About 100,000 words survive of his notes on the books he read. He described Cromwell thus: “Courageous, clever, deceitful, dissimulating, his early principles of lofty republicanism yielded to the devouring flames of his ambition; and, having tasted the sweets of power, he aspired to the pleasure of reigning alone.” At Auxonne, in April 1789, Bonaparte got his first taste of putting down the mob, commanding small bodies of soldiery that restrained Revolutionary excess at the point of a bayonet, exactly as Cromwell would have done. He translated his Corsican Jacobinism into mainland French terms. The Bastille fell; the Estates General became the Constituent Assembly; Louis was stripped of his executive powers and made a virtual prisoner, and his attempted escape abroad in the midsummer of 1791 ended in disaster. Army officers were asked to take an oath of allegiance to the Assembly in consequence, and most of them, being royalists, refused. Bonaparte took it on 4 July. His view was that Louis should have been banished, not imprisoned and executed, and that the young Louis XVII should have been proclaimed regent. In practice, however, he threw in his lot with the republicans. It became increasingly clear to him that the Bourbon monarchy was finished, the king a doomed puppet. On 20 April 1792, the moderate Girondin ministry forced Louis to declare war on Austria, and on 15 May on Sardinia. The Revolutionary slogan soon became: “War with all kings and peace with all peoples.” Bonaparte, who was rarely less than a realist, knew this was rhetorical nonsense, but he could accommodate it. No professional soldier ever regards the declaration of war as an unmitigated evil, and the prospect of general war in Europe was enticing. War meant promotion, bigger commands. On 30 August 1792, Bonaparte was promoted to captain, backdated, with arrears of pay. Civilian Europe entered a dark age, but good times for the warriors had begun.
