Not unnaturally, the revulsion to the horrors of war felt after 1918 tended to swing the pendulum of opinion concerning Napoleon back to the “man of blood” concept, the “Corsican ogre” school of thought; he tended to be regarded as the prime instigator of Armageddon. This trend has persisted almost to the present day, and since 1939 a new twist has been applied in likening Napoleon to that other “Corporal,” Adolf Hitler. Although since the late 1940s a more balanced view has emerged, many scholars still tend to regard Napoleon as at best a talented thug. Nevertheless, the appearance in recent years of numerous “glossy” volumes is tending to reestablish part of the old worship.
In this way the wheel has turned full cycle several times and will probably continue to do so for many generations to come, for the appeal—or revulsion—associated with Napoleon’s name is ageless. He was undoubtedly one of the most complex and gifted humans ever to grace—or bedevil—this planet.
Before turning to consider Napoleon’s qualities and faults as a soldier, it is necessary to attempt to answer one or two questions regarding the period and his character as a whole, for the basic traits of Napoleon the man inevitably affected the characteristics of Napoleon the soldier. First we must consider how far he owed his meteoric career to his own qualities and how much to contemporary circumstances. There can be no denying the greatness and sweep of his natural attainments; he probably would have gone far in any age, but he was exceptionally fortunate to be born when he was. To the end of his days, despite his growing tendency to believe in his own propaganda’s image of himself as semidivine, Napoleon acknowledged the part played by sheer good luck in his amazing career. He freely admitted to Las Cases that the French Revolution paved the way for the career ouverte aux talents and created the situation which he was ideally suited to exploit. He was fortunate to be twenty years old in 1789, at a time when all the ancient monarchies of Europe (save only Great Britain) were in decline. He was fortunate to have been born into the Corsican petite noblesse, for this fact eased his way in the earliest years and yet did not obstruct his rise to power after the overthrow of the Ancien Régime. He further claimed that his Corsican origin greatly assisted him in his first Italian campaign, when everything was very much in the balance for him as an unproved, newly promoted commander in chief of twenty-six. His marriage to Josephine also proved a godsend, for it brought him into contact with the middle-of-the way royalist factions who later helped him along the road to the throne. He also described himself as fortunate in the size of his family, which enabled him to multiply his means of influence through marriage alliances and kingly appointments—though some might qualify this blessing, for the help his fratellos and sisters afforded him proved very much a two-edged sword. He was also fortunate that almost all his military opponents were in their sixties. Napoleon had a penchant for luck on the battlefield—although he would probably have strenuously denied so intangible a quality; he was adamant that a genius could give chance an almost mathematical place in his calculations. In general terms, however, we must aver that he was blessed with extraordinary good fortune—at least until late 1806. As the historian Hudson has written, “His powers were his own, but circumstances rendered them effective.”2
Next we must attempt to answer a difficult question: was Napoleon fundamentally a good or a bad man? It is very hard to say, for it is practically impossible to define absolute “goodness” or “badness” in a human being. Basically he was endowed with as many qualities and faults as any man, but the unique circumstances of his genius and opportunity increased the scope of these far beyond normal limits. He probably wielded more power than any other man in recorded history until his time, and in the end this probably corrupted him. From the beginning his realism was associated with a tendency toward fatalism. “All that is to happen is written down. Our hour is marked and we cannot prolong it a minute longer than fate has predestined.”3 This fatalistic attitude gradually coalesced with his belief in his being set apart from ordinary men—a belief that crystallized (or so Napoleon claimed) on the evening of the Battle of the Bridge of Lodi in 1796. In the end this belief in his “destiny” perverted his judgment, as we shall examine in more detail a little later, and led him to irrational obstinacy in the years of decline. He regarded formal religion as a force to be controlled, but personally subscribed to beliefs that can be termed deistic or even agnostic, rather than conventionally religious.
He was an affectionate husband and a proud father, and he was not wholly unmindful of the well-being of his servants (although he drove one and all mercilessly). This is not to deny his extra-marital adventures nor his callous attitude toward loss of life on the field of battle, but his hot Italian blood and his contrasting cold efficiency as a general explain if they do not justify both traits. He could be ruthless or magnaminous, kind or scathing, badtempered or charming—but he was consistently dynamic and left a lasting impression on everyone he met.
It is fascinating to speculate what kind of a ruler or soldier he would have made in the mid-twentieth century—perhaps a combination of General de Gaulle on the one hand and Douglas MacArthur on the other. As regards the viability of nuclear weapons, he would very probably have been a thorn in the flesh of the cautious: “It is a principle of war that when it is possible to make use of thunderbolts, they should be preferred to cannon.”4 But this is both to speculate and digress.
Thirdly, we must try to determine how far he was personally responsible for the series of devastating wars which will always be the first mental association conjured up by mention of his name. There can obviously be no denying that he was very much a man devoted to war. During the twenty-three-odd years of his active career, he fought no less than sixty battles. Hardly a recommendation for the reputation of a pacifist! It is calculated that between March 1804 and April 1815 practically two million native-born Frenchmen saw active service in his successive armies; there were no less than thirty-two levies on the various annual classes over the same period, and probably a further million men were procured from allied or satellite states. Estimates of casualties over the eleven years fluctuate enormously; some authorities place them as high as 1,750,000 (probably including the losses of his allies), others as comparatively “low” as 450,000 killed and incapacitatingly wounded. The only statistic that can be given with any reasonable certainty is the figure of 15,000 officer casualties.
Nevertheless these losses—immense though they are—should not be misrepresented. It must be remembered that the casualties, even if they total 1,500,000, were spread over eleven years and include all fronts, averaging out at 136,000 a year. This figure palls into relative insignificance beside, say, the casualty lists of the 1914-18 war, when the French lost 1,360,000 men on the Western Front alone (or an average of 340,000 a year)—and these figures do not take into account the heavy losses sustained by the British, Belgians and Americans. This is not to justify the Napoleonic Wars and the suffering they caused for one instant. Populations were far smaller for one thing, thus the proportion of casualties was heavier than appears at first sight; nor is there any denying the scale of losses suffered by France’s victims or opponents. Nevertheless, it is useful to keep the casualty question in proper perspective in any attempt to evaluate Napoleon’s responsibility as a war lord.
As for the degree of responsibility he must bear as the initiator of wars, this too is a very complex problem. Except in the cases of Portugal (1807), Spain (1808) and Russia (1812), in the first instance he was usually attacked. However, there can be no denying that many of these attacks were, in the last analysis, provoked by the Emperor for both military and propaganda reasons. In his defense it can be claimed that he lived in a very war-prone age and that there would almost certainly have been a long series of dire struggles whether he had seized the helm of France or not. The French Revolution, of which he was the product and in some ways the preserver, disseminator and liquidator at one and the same time, had already set the First Republic apart from the rest of Europe while Napoleon was st
ill an unknown artillery lieutenant and colonel of volunteers. The social and economic upheavals that followed the act of political defiance in 1789 implied the end of the Ancien Régime, not only in France but throughout the Continent (although owing to Waterloo the final dissolution did not occur until after 1848 in the case of Germany and 1917 in the case of Russia). The concepts of Liberté, Egalité et Fraternité, the dictums of Rousseau and Diderot, implied a total upheaval of the old order and liberated immense energy and proselytizing zeal among the French people. Wars, then, were inevitable, and it can be as fairly argued that Napoleon was the victim of a war-prone generation as the “man of blood” responsible for the scale of the holocaust that gripped Europe for so many years. He himself realized this when he remarked at the time of the Peace of Amiens: “Between old monarchies and a young republic the spirit of hostility must always exist. In the present state of affairs every peace treaty means no more than a brief armistice; and I believe that my destiny will be to fight almost continuously.”5 It is possible that this realistic—and possibly slightly cynical—point of view led him to regard war as an inevitable evil and consequently to indulge in it with slightly less travail of conscience than might be considered desirable. But after 1791 France was ripe for an expansionist and ideological war, and it is very doubtful whether Napoleon could have withstood the flood of aggressive energy even had he so desired. To some extent, then, his fatalistic view was justifiable.
Of course, this acceptance of the likelihood of great wars did not prevent the crafty Corsican—possibly the most unscrupulous statesman since Machiavelli—from wringing every possible propaganda advantage from a sustained “peace” offensive in pursuit of his ambitious dreams. He was forever declaiming his peaceful intentions—almost all great scourges since Attila the Hun and Genghis Khan have spared no effort to create the image of peace-loving men of action regretfully resorting to arms in a just cause after all other means of persuasion have failed. And it is quite probable that he was genuine in his protestations—at least in his own eyes. However, he was always insistent that he must hand down peace from Olympus to grateful client-states; there was little preference for compromise in his Corsican nature, for all his superb opportunism on certain critical occasions. Consequently if Europe was to have peace it had to be a Pax Romana, dictated and supervised by the Emperor Napoleon. So self-confident and arrogant a claim could only still further exacerbate France’s relations with the other powers, which to the end of his days regarded Napoleon as a Corsican upstart of no breeding or taste, for all his dynamic genius; Great Britain, for example, referred to him as “General Bonaparte” in most official documents until long after his death. Thus, although wars were largely inevitable through the interaction of the snobbish suspicions of the old monarchies, the brash overconfidence of the new Republic (and later of the Consulate and Empire) and the even more fundamental colonial and commercial rivalries bedeviling Anglo-French relations, Napoleon must stand convicted of not playing the diplomatic game with the utmost of tact.
This lack of tact—the “golden quality” of statesmanship—was at least partially responsible for the frequency of the wars and certainly was one definite strand in the causation of Napoleon’s fall. He could never convert an ex-enemy into a convinced ally, however great his personal charm and magnetic appeal in têtes-à-tête with kings and emperors. Every ally was turned into an unhappy vassal, every defeated foe into a resentful satellite; Napoleon’s price for his favors was always high in terms of men, money and commercial policy. He scorned many of his fellow rulers and made little attempt to conceal the fact. He regarded every new treaty of alliance as an opportunity to procure more soldiers, more assistance in his “vendetta” struggle against “perfidious Albion”—the one opponent that never submitted to his will.
Napoleon, then, cannot be represented in any way as the “dove of peace.” The razor-sharp beak and talons of the eagle were most inadequately concealed beneath the assumed white plumage of sweet reasonableness. If Europe was to have peace, it had to be on France’s—or rather Napoleon’s—terms. And what appeared as peace to the Emperor smacked far too strongly of serfdom to the other powers. Moreover, once France had let the “genie” of nationalism out of the bottle, there was no way of controlling the consequences. The nationalistic enthusiasm of the French armies spread the gospel little by little throughout Germany and Italy, and although the forces of reaction managed to postpone their total eclipse for almost half a century, the spirit of nationalism burned on and in the end proved one of Napoleon’s doughtiest opponents. Military victory and dictated peaces no longer promised quiescence and subservience; the underground of the patriots worked on in Prussia and elsewhere toward the day when the French chains would be thrown off and the “Bully of Europe” brought low. And this is exactly what happened after 1812. The Empire proved to be built on wholly insecure foundations.
In the Emperor’s defense, it must be said that although he was at least partially responsible for liberating and disseminating ideas that could only lead to new conflicts, he never entered upon wars lightly. He always advocated a relatively humane type of warfare: he desired the short, sharp, conclusive campaign, never the long, drawn-out agony of attrition for attrition’s sake. But when this goal eluded him—as it generally did from December 1806 onwards—he could resort to an animal ferocity and ruthlessness that were also part of his Corsican inheritance. There were decided limitations to both his patience and his greatness.
We must now turn to a specific consideration of Napoleon as a soldier and commander. Much of what has already been mentioned is obviously relevant, but there are special characteristics that need mention and illustration. For convenience these remarks will be organized in two parts: a discussion of Napoleon’s military attributes at the time of his prime, followed by an analysis of their deterioration. The dividing line between the years of success and the years of gradual decline is difficult to draw with accuracy, but at least on the military side it is feasible to claim that Napoleon passed his peak in December 1806. Many general historians and biographers prefer to consider the Conference at Tilsit (1807) or even the meeting at Erfurt (1808) as the high water mark of the First Empire. However true this may be of political and constitutional primacy, there are good reasons for believing that Napoleon’s military decline began shortly after the double victory of Jena-Auerstadt.
In justification of this suggestion, the following points are relevant. Despite the apparent completeness of the military triumph over Prussia (no less than 70 per cent of her effective forces were either casualties or prisoners after the double victory and the succeeding weeks of ruthless pursuit), the simple fact is that Napoleon failed to gain the desired pacification (on his terms, of course) with the Prussian Government. As has already been mentioned, Napoleon always sought the quick knockout blow, the rapid and economic destruction of the foe’s will to resist. This patently failed to materialize after Jena-Auerstadt; however vacillating Frederick William III might be, the strong will of the Queen of Prussia remained as defiant as before, and consequently Napoleon was robbed of a conclusive success. This check to his plans had two effects of the greatest possible significance.
In the first place, it led immediately to the unforeseen and certainly undesired winter campaign of 1806-07 in Poland and East Prussia. This further involved a renewed direct confrontation with Tsar Alexander—a complication Napoleon had been anxious to avoid, hoping that a “blitzkrieg” onslaught on Prussia would lay that opponent utterly hors de combat and consequently dissuade Russia from entering a struggle which had already ended so patently in the French favor. In the event, these plans were frustrated. Another immediate consequence of the embroilment with Russia was the severe check suffered by the Grande Armée at Eylau in February 1807. Although the real outcome of this bitter battle was largely concealed by Imperial propaganda, the truth of the matter was known within Russia and soon spread to the patriot groups working against the French in Germany and Italy
. Admittedly the outcome of the battle can be fairly represented only as a draw, but this should not lead to an underestimation of its contemporary significance; the point was that the supposedly infallible victor of Arcola, Rivoli, Marengo, Austerlitz and Jena had received a major military check. The news served as a tonic to Napoleon’s opponents, and his reputation suffered its first real blow, which neither the later triumph at Friedland nor the pageantry of Tilsit could completely eradicate. “The Ogre” had been proved fallible.
In the second place, some months before the murder that was Eylau, Napoleon had committed a cardinal error of grand strategy which ultimately proved fatal to his Empire. Thwarted of a conqueror’s peace after Jena-Auerstadt and blaming this apparently minor setback on “the nation of shopkeepers”, the Emperor had sought a way of striking back at Great Britain, which, since Trafalgar the previous year, had been able to defy Napoleon’s threats of direct military assault over the Channel with impunity. From 1803 onward—if not even earlier—Napoleon was obsessed by a desire to see Great Britain brought to terms. All the evils of life in imperial Europe were as a matter of course imputed to the combination of British gold, British intrigue and the Royal Navy. Even in the victory bulletin after Austerlitz, Napoleon had spoken in derogatory terms of the Tsar’s favorite aide-de-camp as “a youthful trumpeter of England.” Now, a year later, he turned his mind once more to the problem of cowing the British people. The outcome was the Berlin Decrees of December 1806. Realizing that direct military pressure was ruled out for the time being, Napoleon decided to strike at England through her life-giving trade. There was nothing very new in the idea of an economic blockade, but never before had so rigorous an exclusion of enemy goods, not only from the Empire but from the rest of Europe as well, been demanded.
As it turned out, however, the Continental System (as this declaration of all-out economic warfare became known) rebounded with a vengeance on the head of its creator. It had three dire consequences. First, it completely failed to cow Great Britain or even permanently impair her economic position. This was so because it was impossible to enforce the policy with complete efficiency and because the British command of the seas ennabled her to channel her rejected goods to new markets over the Atlantic. Secondly, the British countermeasures, the Orders in Council of various dates, were far more effectively applied, and despite her natural resources and those she could wring out of her satellites and allies, the French economy eventually began to feel the pinch—certainly by 1812. Furthermore, much of the inconvenience and dislocation so caused was blamed on the Emperor by all Continental countries, while the increasingly rigid steps he felt compelled to adopt in order to see that his system was properly imposed left nothing but resentment and ill will in their train, weakening the foundations of the Empire with increasing effect; evasions of the system became widespread, and a thriving illicit trade between Great Britain and Holland, Italy and to a lesser extent Germany rapidly developed. Some of the Emperor’s most trusted servants openly connived at these evasions, including Louis, King of Holland (until he was forced to abdicate by Napoleon in 1810), Massena in Italy and Bourienne, Governor of Hamburg. Thirdly, and most detrimentally of all, his increasing obsession with the need to spread the Continental System and perfect its working played no insignificant part in inducing Napoleon to make his two cardinal errors of military and political judgment: the decision to invade Portugal and Spain in 1807-08 and the decision to attack Russia in 1812. All these difficulties stem from the steps taken in December 1806; this date, therefore, almost certainly forms the “hinge of fate” in the Napoleonic Wars.
The Campaigns of Napoleon Page 3
