by Paul Johnson
These follies were economic rather than military, since even before Bonaparte returned to France the generals—chiefly Michel Ney, André Masséna, and Guillaume Brune—had restored the situation on France’s frontiers. But inflation soared uncontrollably. The Directory’s paper currency, originally traded at fifty francs to the gold franc, had sunk to 100,000. The distress this caused was compounded by a new conscription law that made all five Directors, notably Barras, the most powerful, personal objects of hatred. There were serious food shortages and universal accusations of corruption. Of the Directors, the abbé Joseph Sieyès (1748-1836), an old Revolutionary hand who had helped to sink, in turn, Danton and Robespierre, decided to make himself popular by betraying his colleagues. He recruited Charles-Maurice Talleyrand (1754-1848), who was running foreign policy, and Joseph Fouché (1759-1820), the minister of police, and the three picked Bonaparte as the most likely “sword,” who could direct the more forceful side of the business. Even by the sordid standards of Revolution coups, the 18 Brumaire coup (9 November 1799) was a low business, since everyone involved was prepared to betray all the others, and not one of them stuck to what he had sworn to do. If Bonaparte became a ruler of exceptional treachery and mendacity, it must be remembered that he emerged from a political background where a man’s word meant nothing, honor was dead, and murder was routine. The coup was preceded by a decree making Bonaparte commander of all troops in the Paris area, including the bodyguard of the Directors. After that, the Directors, including Barras, Bonaparte’s mentor and patron, and their 500 elders (a rubber-stamp senate), deputies, and assorted creatures of the pseudodemocratic government were easy meat. The only scene of note was Bonaparte’s appearance, in full uniform, accompanied by two grenadiers (leaving the rest of his escort outside) in the actual chamber of the 500 at Saint-Cloud. He was greeted with cries of “Outlaw!” and “Kill him.” The grenadiers were beaten and Bonaparte was “shaken like a rat”—the only time in his entire career when hands were laid on his person. At that point the army rushed in and took Bonaparte away, blood covering his face—an uncovenanted accident of which he made the most: “There are men armed with knives, in the pay of England, who are inside the chamber.” All the legislators were then put under arrest, and orders were issued for a new constitution to be prepared.
This new constitution, promulgated on 13 December 1799, following a plebiscite, dissolved the Directory and its appendages, and set up, in Roman fashion, a Consulate. The First Consul was Bonaparte, the others being Sieyès and a succession of nonentities. There were also various bodies, the Conseil d’état, le Tribunat, the Corps législatif, le Sénat conservateur, designed to maintain a representative façade. But in fact what emerged was a simple military dictatorship of one man. The electorate was smaller than the one that produced the tiers état or lower house under the ancien régime, the restraints on the executive were far weaker—nonexistent in practice—and the executive itself was personalized in the First Consul to an extent unknown since Louis XIV’s time, when he proclaimed: “L’état—c’est moi.” In fact the new First Consul was far more powerful than Louis XIV, since he dominated the armed forces directly in a country that was now organized as a military state. All the ancient legal restraints on divine-right kingship—the church, the aristocracy and its resources, the courts, the cities and their charters, the universities and their privileges, the guilds and their immunities—all had already been swept away by the Revolution, leaving France a legal blank on which Bonaparte could stamp the irresistible force of his personality. After this one coup, it was easy for Bonaparte to make himself Consul for Life (4 August 1802) and in due course emperor (18 May 1804).
But first he had to justify his vast power by a personal military victory at the head of his armies. The elites and the people had promoted the Man on Horseback to impose order after the years of revolution and tumult, but now they expected him to scatter their enemies. The Austrians, during his absence, had reconquered most of north Italy, thus nullifying his earlier campaign there and upsetting his peace of Campo Formio. So Italy was the natural battleground for him. He spent the early months of 1800 reorganizing the army, then personally led a great set-piece prelude to his campaign by taking an army of 50,000, himself at its head, through the Great Saint Bernard Pass at a time of year (the third week of May) when conditions were still icy and the snow deep. This produced the finest of all Napoleonic images, captured by David, of the Man on Horseback urging on his troops amid the snow. In fact he ascended the Alps on a tiresome mule, which he cursed and belabored as it slithered on the ice, but he did get his men safely across, though they lost much of their heavy equipment in the passage. He gloated: “We have fallen on the Austrians like a thunderbolt!”
This second Italian campaign was full of risks and near disasters, and its culminating battle at Marengo (14 June 1800), where Bonaparte was short of artillery and had only 24,000 men facing a much larger Austrian force, nearly went against him. He was saved by his favorite general, Desaix, who made it possible for Bonaparte to launch a surprising counterattack after nearly fourteen hours’ hard fighting, and it was this which tumbled the Austrians into a scramble for safety, having lost 14,000 men. Desaix was killed in the moment of triumph, evoking from Bonaparte a rare personal tribute. Marengo was presented as one of Bonaparte’s most spectacular victories, but it was a close-run thing that might have gone either way. Nor did it end the war, which dragged on throughout the summer and autumn until another French army destroyed the main Austrian force at Hohenlinden (3 December), leaving Vienna naked. The Treaty of Lunéville (February 1801) followed, Austria being forced to acknowledge the creation of various French satellites in Holland, Germany, and Italy, and to allow France the Rhine as her eastern border. Bonaparte took full credit for this peace, soon followed by the Peace of Amiens with the English. His consulate for life was the reward.
In the meantime, Bonaparte had severed himself from his Revolutionary past by an act of statesmanship that long outlived him. Not only had he no religious belief, he actively disliked clerics, except his useful Corsican uncle, Cardinal Fesch. But he recognized that most French people were Catholics and would remain so. The outlawing and persecution of the French church made no sense to him. A persecuted church was a focus and excuse for civil unrest in Catholic France, especially in the southwest, Brittany, and Alsace-Lorraine. Then again, he thought that the clergy made admirable schoolteach ers, at least in primary schools, instilling in their young pupils simple morals and a respect for duly constituted authority. Moreover, by making peace with the church, he prepared the way for a reconciliation with the old landowners and aristocrats who had been driven into exile by the Revolution, and whom he wanted back to provide further legitimacy to his regime. Bonaparte in 1800 saw endless vistas opening up before him as the first ruler of Europe. But they demanded, for realization, a France united behind his leadership, or as united as he could make it.
Hence in 1801-2 he negotiated and had passed into law a concordat with Pope Pius VII. It reversed Revolutionary laws passed in the 1790s and reestablished Catholicism as the religion “of the majority of the French.” In some respects it went back to the earlier concordat of Leo X and François I (1516), which allowed the French government to supervise the appointment of the higher clergy and the payment of the lower ones. It lasted until 1905, when it fell victim to the anticlerical backlash following the Dreyfus case, and can be regarded as Bonaparte’s most durable civil achievement next to his law code. It incorporated an agreement establishing relations between France and the papacy, thus making Pius VII available to sanction Bonaparte’s acceptance of a crown and to preside at a coronation.
The actual enthronement of Bonaparte, which was clearly coming, was precipitated by the so-called Pichegru-Cadoudal plot, which came to light in November 1803. It involved General Victor Moreau (a rival military hero and the victor of Hohenlinden), the British secret service, and Georges Cadoudal (leader of the Chouan rebels of Brittany), a
nd it proposed to kill Bonaparte and replace him by a new consulate. The plotters were variously disposed of, and in the process Bonaparte had the young duc d’Enghien, a minor royal, abducted from Germany and judicially murdered. Enghien was probably innocent and certainly harmless, and his killing was designed to inspire terror among more dangerous exiles. It was now widely proposed, no doubt at Bonaparte’s direction, that he be declared emperor, on the grounds that a hereditary succession would confirm and perpetuate the regime and make his assassination pointless. On 4 May, the Senate proposed and passed a resolution making Bonaparte hereditary “Emperor of the French,” with the title of Napoleon I. On 14 May, a new constitution was published. It was confirmed by plebiscite on 6 November, with 3,571,329 “yes” votes to 2,570 “noes.” (Bonaparte was the first dictator to produce fake election figures.) Bonaparte was entitled by law to nominate his own successor, if necessary an adopted son. A coronation was staged at Notre Dame on 2 December 1804. The décor was gilt, the image a golden bee. The pope was present, having been kept waiting for four hours in a freezing cathedral before being denied his real role in the ceremony, since Bonaparte himself took the crowns from the altar and placed them on his own head and Josephine’s. There is some dispute whether this gesture was spontaneous or rehearsed and had been cleared with the pope. The ceremony was marred by rows between Josephine and Bonaparte’s sisters, who hated her and resented being told to carry her train. She burst into tears when the crown was put on her head and later complained of agony when she was made to continue wearing it all through the protracted coronation feast that followed. So far as can be seen, the assumption of the crown made no difference either way in effecting a reconciliation between the regime and royalist exiles, or in getting the courts of Europe to accept the legitimacy of Napoleonic rule in their hearts as opposed to treaties won in battle. Becoming emperor lost Bonaparte most of the European liberals. But it increased his power over the army, especially over the rank and file. It became the foundation stone of a mounting edifice of satellite kingdoms, princedoms, and duchies, of medals, honors, and stars, of protocols and privileges that the new emperor created and bestowed at will, and frequently revoked, too. But behind the tinsel and the glitter, Bonaparte was still only as secure as his last victory made him.
CHAPTER THREE
The Master of the Battlefield
BONAPARTE WAS FIRST and foremost a military man, a soldier, a general, a commander of armies, and a deadly destroyer of his opponents’ military capacity. His aim throughout his career was to move swiftly to a position where he obliged the enemy to fight a major battle, destroy the enemy’s forces, and then occupy his capital and dictate peace terms. That is what he invariably did when he had any choice in the matter. He was absolutely consistent in his grand strategy, and on the whole it served him well. It fitted his temperament, which was audacious, hyperactive, aggressive, and impatient of results. Indeed, impatience was his salient characteristic, serving him for both good and ill. As Wellington, who thoroughly understood Bonaparte’s strengths and weaknesses, remarked, he lacked the patience to fight a defensive campaign, and even when he appeared to be doing so, in the winter of 1813-14, he was really looking for an opportunity to make an attack and win a decisive, aggressive battle.
Hence speed was of the essence in Bonaparte’s methods. He used speed both to secure the maximum disparity between his own forces and the enemy’s, by attacking the latter before they were fully mobilized and deployed, and also to secure surprise, both strategic and tactical. He moved large armies across Europe faster than any man before him. He was able to do this, first, because of his ability to read both large- and small-scale maps and plan the fastest and safest routes. In the study of terrain, and the visual reconstruction of it in his own mind, his imagination was at its most potent. Second, helped by good staff officers, he was able to translate these campaign routes into detailed orders for all arms with a celerity and exactitude that were truly astonishing. Third, he infused all his commanders with this appetite for speed and fast movement. Indeed, the common soldiers learned to move fast, taking long marches for granted in the knowledge that, whenever possible, Bonaparte tried to ensure they got lifts on baggage carts in rotation. (During the Hundred Days he got his troops to Paris without obliging most of them to march at all.)
Bonaparte himself set an example of speed. He was often seen flogging not only his own horse but that of his aide riding alongside him. His consumption of horsepower was unprecedented and horrifying. In the pursuit of speed by his armies, hundreds of thousands of these creatures died in their traces, driven beyond endurance. Millions of them died during his wars, and the struggle to replace them became one of his most formidable supply problems. The quality of French remounts deteriorated steadily during the decade 1805-15 and this helps to explain the declining performance of the French cavalry.
The speed with which his armies moved was also due to the strong motivation of his troops. The armies identified their interests and their future with Bonaparte, and the lower the rank, the more complete this identification became. There is a puzzle here. Bonaparte cared nothing for the lives of his soldiers. He disregarded losses, provided his objectives were secured. He told Metternich in 1813, during a day-long argument about the future of Europe, that he would gladly sacrifice a million men to secure his paramountcy. Moreover, having got his army into a fix, and having written off the campaign accordingly, he repeatedly abandoned the army to its fate and hastened back to Paris to secure his political position. This happened in Egypt, in Russia, in Spain, and in Germany. Bonaparte was never held to account for these desertions, or indeed for his losses of French troops, which averaged more than 50,000 killed a year. By comparison, Wellington’s losses from his six years’ campaign in the Iberian Peninsula totaled 36,000 from all causes, including desertion, or 6,000 a year. This disparity brought a rueful reflection from Wellington:
I can hardly conceive of anything greater than Napoleon at the head of an army—especially a French army. Then he had one prodigious advantage—he had no responsibility—he could do what he pleased; and no man ever lost more armies than he did. Now with me the loss of every man told. I could not risk so much. I knew that if I ever lost 500 men without the clearest necessity, I should be brought on my knees to the bar of the House of Commons.
This freedom to take risks, which Bonaparte enjoyed except at the outset of his career, was not enjoyed by any of his opponents, all of whom were surrounded by jealous rivals and subject to political authority. And Bonaparte took the fullest possible advantage of it throughout. It fit in perfectly with his general strategy of swift aggression and offensive battle seeking. It usually came off, and when it did not, Bonaparte gave practical expression to the old army maxim “never reinforce failure,” and left.
The soldiers liked this high-risk approach. In their calculations, they were as likely to be killed by a defensive and cautious commander as by an attacking one, and with little chance of loot to balance the risk. Soldiers like action. High casualty rates mean quicker promotion and higher pay. Moreover, in Bonaparte’s armies, unlike all the others, promotion was usually on merit. Private soldiers had a good chance of promotion to senior noncommissioned rank and a reasonable chance of becoming officers, even generals. Under Bonaparte’s rules, a proficient soldier could transfer to the Guard, the army’s elite force, where he was paid as much as a sergeant in a line regiment. Good food (where possible), high rates of pay, and loot—these were the material inducements Bonaparte offered. He also fraternized with the men. Byron’s friend Hob-house, who watched Bonaparte inspect a parade during the Hundred Days, was astonished to see him pull the noses of soldiers he picked out from the ranks. This was taken as a sign of affection. He also slapped the faces of favored officers, quite hard. This, too, was not taken amiss. Bonaparte knew how to talk to his men around their campfires. His public addresses were short and simple: “Soldiers, I expect you to fight hard today.” “Soldiers, be brave, be resolu
te!” “Soldiers, make me proud of you!” Bonaparte liked and expected to be cheered by his men, in contrast to Wellington, who dismissed cheering as “coming dangerously close to an expression of opinion,” and would never have dreamed of touching one of his officers, let alone a private soldier; he detested commissioning from the ranks, believing that officers so made remained slaves to drink. There were advantages and disadvantages to both approaches.
Once Bonaparte became First Consul, and still more after he was crowned, he turned his soldiers into a privileged caste. Wellington often observed that Bonaparte’s presence on the field was worth 40,000 men in the balance. What he meant was not a tribute to Bonaparte’s tactical skill but a reflection on his power. He explained his remark in a memorandum he wrote for Lord Stanhope in 1836:
[Napoleon] was the sovereign of the country as well as the chief of the army. That country was constituted on a military basis. All its institutions were framed for the purpose of forming and maintaining its armies with a view to conquest. All the offices and rewards of the state were reserved in the first instance exclusively for the army. An officer, even a private soldier, of the army might look to the sovereignty of a kingdom as the reward for his services. It is obvious that the presence of the sovereign with an army so constituted must greatly excite their exertions.
