Napoleon

by Paul Johnson

  In this awesome transformation, Bonaparte was the De mogorgon, the infernal executive, superbly molded by nature and trained by his own ambitions and experiences to take the fullest advantage of the power the Revolution had created and bequeathed to him. His sensibilities were blunt. His compassion was shallow. His imagination did not trouble him. He had had no religion since (so he said), at the age of nine he heard a preacher insist that his hero, Caesar, was burning in hell. His conscience, never active, was under control. His will possessed his entire being, which otherwise was under no restraints. His capacities were immense. His energy was god-like. Thus, as George Meredith put it, he was “hugest of engines, a much limited man.”

  Bonaparte’s invasion of Italy in 1796, his first strategic campaign as such, was for the French people an imaginative and symbolic success, as well as a military triumph. The French invasion of Italy at the end of the fifteenth century had ended medieval Europe, and was registered in the French collective mind as a historic event. By resuming the attempt at Italian conquest, Bonaparte struck a responsive chord. It was also, for a Corsican-Italian-turned-Frenchman, the logical thing to do: to conquer his country of ultimate origin and turn it into a dependency of his new patrie. But his means were limited. When he joined the army, he found that its paper strength of 43,000 was down to little over 30,000, with only sixty cannon, and that the men were unpaid. His first proclamation (28 March 1796) set the tone of his relationship with his troops: “Soldiers, you are naked, ill-fed. . . . But rich provinces and great towns will soon be in your power, and in them you will find honor, glory, and wealth. Soldiers of Italy! Will you be wanting in courage and steadfastness [to obtain these things]?” From the first, Bonaparte had an implicit contract with his men: they would make his victories possible, and in return he would ensure them loot. More, he would make it easy for their spoils to be transferred back to their families. This made military sense, for it enabled soldiers to save instead of squandering their trophies on drunken debauchery. Needless to say, the officers, especially the divisional commanders, benefited a fortiori from this system, and Bonaparte most of all, both on his own account and in the state loot (money in bullion and specie, and works of art) he had transferred to the government in Paris, to reconcile its members to his increasingly high-handed and independent actions. Northern Italy was an ideal field for such a joint-stock looting expedition. Neither the House of Savoy nor the Habsburgs were popular, the small independent states were decrepit, and there were literally thousands of churches, convents, monasteries, and chantries, and valuable paintings and holy vessels in gold and silver, waiting to be pillaged. Bonaparte was careful not to wage war against the church, as earlier republican armies had done, and always stopped his men from slaughtering the clergy, believing them to be a valuable force for social control. But he had no hesitation in “liberating” church property, loading it up on his supply wagons “for safe custody.”

  Bonaparte had as his chief of staff Louis Berthier (1753- 1815), who served him faithfully and efficiently in a variety of senior roles, but mainly as staff chief—he was known as “the Emperor’s Wife”—until the abdication of 1814. It was a symbiosis of military minds, as Berthier translated his master’s strategic plans into men and matériel and issued clearly written orders to get them into place. Bonaparte owed a lot to him and rewarded him well with lands and titles; he was never quite so effective when Berthier was not there. Bonaparte also had three good divisional commanders, including André Masséna (1758-1817), a former ship’s boy, sergeant-major, and smuggler, who became one of the most reliable of subordinates, though with an incorrigible taste for looting (and accepting bribes) that made even his master blush.

  Given his limited resources, Bonaparte’s invasion of Italy was a daring venture, which repeatedly surprised the Pied montese and the Austrians with its risky river crossing and speed of attack. He won minor battles at Montenotte, Dego (again), Mondovi, and Codogno; and at Lodi, early in May, he carried off a sensational action in which 3,500 French grenadiers charged the bridge over the Po and held it against 10,000 of the enemy until Masséna’s reinforcements arrived. This delighted the French public, as did the army’s triumphant entry into Milan on 13 May, where it was rapturously greeted by the mob, or at least a mob, an event made immortal by Stendhal in the opening chapter of Le Rouge et le noir. The conquest of Lombardy was essentially a campaign of rivers and bridgeheads. Bonaparte won it against superior Austrian forces, who on the whole fought bravely and stubbornly, by his rapidity of movement, surprise, and tactical ruses. He rounded it up with a famous victory at Arcola, the crossing of the river Alpone, on 15-17 November. This was a characteristic Bonaparte battle. His campaigning style, with its rapid transfers of troops, involved high risks, which sometimes produced potential disasters when faced with a methodical opponent like the Austrians. Bonaparte reckoned to extricate himself from these dangers by his gift of rapid improvisation, his ingenuity, the resourcefulness of Berthier, and the panache of his men. The three-day Battle of Arcola was a classic case of this risky strategy rescued by clever tactics, including a ruse whereby Bonaparte sent a platoon of scouts behind the enemy lines with orders to set up a hullabaloo and persuade the Austrians they were almost encircled. Their hasty withdrawal lost them the battle, and Arcola, like Lodi, became a sensational victory in the newssheets and prints, consolidating Bonaparte’s reputation as the republic’s most successful general. On 14 January 1797, he won the decisive Battle of Rivoli, leading to the surrender of the last main Austrian fortress at Mantua. In effect the Habsburgs now withdrew from Italy, leaving Bonaparte to do with it as he pleased.

  It was at this point that Bonaparte ceased to be merely a battle general and became also an imperial proconsul, in fact if not yet in name. When he had set out for Italy, his instructions about political arrangements after success on the field had been cramping. They were successively relaxed (or ignored) as he transmitted larger and larger sums of gold and silver to the French treasury in 1796-97. He could thus make his own policies. His technique, adumbrating the Stalinist methods used in Eastern Europe at the end of the Second World War, was to encourage the formation of “patriotic” and republican committees in the main towns, then respond to their requests for independence under “French protection.” Thus committees at Bologna and Ferrara repudiated papal rule, and at Reggio and Modena the rule of the local duke. All four, with Bonaparte’s encouragement, sent delegates to Milan, and at their meeting declared the formation of the Cis padane Republic, in effect a French puppet state (16 October 1796). The Lombardy towns formed a similar entity called the Transpadane Republic, and Bonaparte knocked the two together to constitute the Cisalpine Republic on 15 July 1797. Meanwhile, he took advantage of a French-organized uprising in Genoa to overthrow the ancient oligarchy there (6 June) and set up what he called the Ligurian Republic. He likewise disposed of the oligarchy in Venice. He supervised the constitutions of the two new states, the first of a score or more he was to create, from his sumptuous viceregal castle at Montebello. He also negotiated the outlines of a peace with Austria, subsequently endorsed by the Directory at the Treaty of Campo Formio (17 October 1797), under which the Habsburgs recognized the two new French protectorates, surrendered the Austrian Netherlands and the Ionian Islands to France, and (in secret) acquiesced in expanding the French frontier to the Rhine.

  This was a huge territorial victory for France and was rightly seen by the French public as Bonaparte’s own. Aged twenty-eight, he was now, in military terms, the most powerful man in the republic, a loose cannon, loaded and primed, on the map of Europe, whom the politicians wanted to keep from Paris by giving him fresh assignments well away from the capital—thereby, of course, risking even more spectacular triumphs on his part. Their first idea was to charge him with the invasion and conquest of England. But, having looked at the resources that would be available to him in terms of warships and transports, he would have none of it. It was, he thought, a passport to a watery gra
ve. Instead, he hit upon, and promptly had adopted, a plan that took him a long way from the center of events (which suited the Directors) but was calculated to appeal strongly to the French imagination—the conquest of the Orient.

  Interest in Egypt had been growing for a generation, and the first indication of what was to become le style égyptien dated back to the 1770s. Bonaparte’s objectives, as put to the Directors, were to found a French free-labor sugar-growing colony to replace the West Indian ones; to dig a Suez canal; and to link up with the Marathas and Tipu Sahib, opponents of British rule in India, and help them destroy it. He had vague plans about the vast Turkish empire, too, of which Egypt was nominally a part. But there was a deeper wish: to play a modern Alexander the Great and acquire rich provinces of inconceivable magnitude. He is said to have remarked: “Europe is too small for me. . . . I must go East.” He calculated that with 30,000 French troops, he could raise another 30,000 mercenaries in Egypt, and with 50,000 camels and 150 cannon, he could be on the Indus within four months. He worked all this out down to the last round of ammunition and water canister.

  The Directors sanctioned the invasion of Egypt—no more—but laid down that Bonaparte must finance and raise the expedition himself. He took them at their word. He sent his most trusted staff chief, Berthier, to the Vatican to raid its treasury. Guillaume Brune, a notable looter, went to Berne and stole the entire Swiss reserve. Barthélemy-Catherine Jou bert forced the Dutch to disgorge. Ten million francs were thus made available, much of it in gold. Bonaparte appointed all the seagoing ships from Genoa and Venice, to add to the Toulon Squadron. The appeal of the expedition enabled him to pick some of the best young officers in the army to accompany him. To sell the project to the French public, he also invited the leading members of the Institut National, created in 1795 to replace the old royal Académie Française and Académie des Inscriptions, to go too. About 160 agreed, and they included some of the best engineers, chemists, mathematicians, historians, archaeologists, mineralogists, geographers, artists and draftsmen, linguists, and writers in France, plus journalists and printers, even a balloonist. It was Bonaparte’s first opportunity to engage in large-scale publicity and propaganda, and he made the most of it. Here was not merely a successful general bent on conquest, but the embodiment of French culture, leading a “civilizing mission” to the seat of the world’s first urban society.

  From first to last, the expedition to Egypt was rich in dramas that provided sensational subject matter for the accomplished artists like Jacques-Louis David and Antoine-Jean Gros whom Bonaparte was beginning to cultivate. By immense good fortune, which Bonaparte continued to enjoy for many years yet, he escaped from Toulon (19 May 1798) without encountering the fleet of the earl of St. Vincent and Lord Nelson, the two British admirals commanding in the Mediterranean. On 12 June, by a combination of threats and bribery, he persuaded the Knights of Malta to surrender their fortress and naval base. He then looted their treasury and ransacked the churches and convents of the island, annexed it to France, and gave it a new government, legal and religious code, and constitution—all in less than a week. Once more evading Nelson, Bonaparte disembarked his men near Alexandria and took it on 2 July. He immediately marched south to Cairo, through the hottest season of the year, dust storms, fly plagues, and appalling water shortages. On 21 July, he drew up his near-mutinous army in squares near the Pyramids, found a field of watermelons that he gave to the soldiers to slake their thirst, issued an Order of the Day to them pointing out that “forty centuries look down upon you,” and invited the Mamluk rulers of Egypt to use their ferocious cavalry against his men. They duly obliged, were mowed down by French fire, and got separated from their infantry, which, in due course, was broken by Bonaparte’s cavalry. Only 29 Frenchmen were killed, the Egyptians losing more than 10,000, and this easy victory, immediately termed “the Battle of the Pyramids,” did wonders for the morale of the entire expedition.

  Bonaparte reached Cairo on 24 July. Declaring himself the protector of Islam who had humbled the pope and destroyed the Knights of Malta, he appointed a committee of notables under a French “adviser,” designated himself overall ruler of Egypt, nominated a senate of 200 locals, and set about drawing up a constitution. He also founded the Egyptian Institute so his scholars and scientists could get to work.

  This scene of peaceful conquest was shattered on 1 August when Nelson destroyed virtually the entire French fleet within the harbor at Alexandria. This left Bonaparte and his army marooned, and it persuaded Turkey to declare war. Bonaparte had other troubles. He received confirmation that Josephine was having an affair, and responded by trying to enjoy the bey’s present of an eleven-year-old virgin (unsatisfactory) and a boy (ditto) and forming a liaison with a twenty-one-year-old French girl, Pauline Fourès, his “Cleopatra.” He also dealt with a bazaar uprising that killed 250 of his men, exacting the deaths of 2,000 Arabs in consequence, and a fierce outbreak of bubonic plague that killed 3,000 Frenchmen. Despite this, he decided to forestall a Turkish attack by his usual aggressive methods and invaded Syria with 14,000 men, leaving only 4,500 behind in Cairo. He took Gaza, then Jaffa, where, fearing trouble from his 4,500 prisoners, he ordered them all slaughtered, which was done by bayonet thrusting or drowning, to save ammunition. Many women and children suffered in this atrocity, probably the worst of all Bonaparte’s war crimes. Plague hit the army again in Jaffa, and Bonaparte—to wipe out the memory of the massacre perhaps, or more likely to provide subject matter for his propagandists—visited the plague hospital to comfort his men. This tender scene was to become, thanks to Gros, the visual climax of the entire expedition.

  Bonaparte’s small army won some brilliant victories against larger Turkish forces, but he failed to take Acre, stoutly defended by Turks under the command of the English admiral Sidney Smith (whose subsequent windy tales of his exploits won him the nickname “Long Acre”). This was Bonaparte’s first major military defeat, and it discomposed him. He decided to return to Egypt with his diminished force of 8,000 men, but ran into a terrifying sandstorm in the Sinai desert. This retreat was an adumbration in miniature, had he only known it, of his future disaster in Russia. At the time, the set-back merely confirmed his resolve to desert what was left of his army and return to France. It was now the summer of 1799, and the war news from Europe was disastrous. Bonaparte used this as his excuse for flight, though he really saw it as his opportunity to “rescue” France and ascend the ladder of power still further, wiping out the failure of his Egyptian expedition in the process. On 11 August he summoned his generals and raged for an hour about the idiocy and cowardice of the Directors. It was imperative that he return and prevent the Allies of the Second Coalition from invading France. This was the first of his prepared tirades, and it worked: they agreed he must go. A week later, Admiral Gantaume, commanding the frigates Muiron and Carrière, told him it was now reasonably safe to put to sea for France, and off he went, leaving Jean-Baptiste Kléber in charge of the doomed army. The latter’s comment summed it up: “He had left us avec ses culottes plein de merde.” Kléber said he would “go back to France and wipe his face in it.”

  As it happens, Bonaparte’s Egyptian expedition is now remembered not so much for military defeat as for cultural success. Indeed, it had a huge impact in France at the time as the “discovery of the Orient,” among a people who, then as now, are either amateurs d’art, intellectuals, or at least pseudo-intellectuals. Despite appalling hardships, the cultural experts did their work well. Among other things, they unearthed the Rosetta stone (promptly captured by the British), which, with its trilingual inscription, enabled Jean-François Champollion (assisted by the Englishman Smith) to decode the language of hieroglyphs, a mystery for two millennia. The most enterprising of the experts was the artist-engraver Vivant Denon (1747-1825), a former minor aristocrat and diplomat, who at Naples under the ancien régime had sketched Sir William Hamilton, the British consul in Naples, and his beautiful and notorious wife, Emma, and learned to
detest the English. The painter David had brought him forward, and in Egypt he came into his own. He embraced the art and architecture of ancient Egypt with passion, traveling up the Nile with General Louis Desaix, who not only won three brilliant battles but enabled Denon to sketch and subsequently to engrave some of the most remarkable temples. His 150 drawings formed the basis both for his quick-sale Voyages dans la Basse et la Haute Egypte (1802), the first serious description of the civilization of ancient Egypt, and the twenty-four magnificent and sumptuously illustrated volumes of his Description de l’Egypte, perhaps the most remarkable publication since the Complutensian Polyglot Bible, a triumph of Spanish sixteenth-century printing in five ancient languages. It is easily the greatest single artifact produced during the entire Napoleonic epoch (though it is rivaled by the Egyptian dinner service made by Sèvres, now in Apsley House, London). These volumes began to appear, with Bonaparte’s enthusiastic support, in 1809, and the series was completed in 1828. Denon launched both the Egyptian Revival in Paris and the idea of Bonaparte as a cultural prince-innovator, turning him into a quasi-Renaissance figure with wide appeal not only throughout France but in the whole of Europe. In short, Denon was a propagandist of genius, and Bonaparte made increasing use of his services, as head of the Louvre (soon renamed the Musée Napoléon) and of all France’s state museums, to the embellishment of which Denon was appointed licensed looter of all Europe’s royal and ecclesiastical art collections.

  Bonaparte thus returned to France with a new role as culture hero ahead of him. With his usual luck he evaded Nelson again, and traveled from the south coast to Paris with such speed that he reached the capital before the Directors knew he was back in France (16 October 1799). His reception was enthusiastic and confirmed his view of the French, and especially the Parisians, first formed during the Revolution—that they were volatile and frivolous, with a short attention span, and could easily be diverted from serious misfortunes by transient excitement. He found that his reverses had been forgotten, his successes remembered, and that he was now widely regarded as l’homme providentiel who would rescue France from the follies of the Directors.