Napoleon: A Life

by Andrew Roberts

He was one of the most unrelenting micromanagers in history, but this obsession with details did not prevent him from radically transforming the physical, legal, political and cultural landscape of Europe.

It was this obsession with details and ability to compartmentalize that allowed him to be more than just a great general. The issue with a monarchy is that tis effectiveness depends on the abilities of a single man, which too often fail or succeed in only one area.

‘I will defend it, for I am the Revolution.’

It was thus Colbertian protectionism that brought him down,

Napoleon didn't really understand the concept of the benefits of free trade and the market. Despite this, h was never really given an opportunity to try them out with Britain (master of trade on the seas) was constantly at war with him.

‘The hero of a tragedy, in order to interest us, should be neither wholly guilty nor wholly innocent … All weakness and all contradictions are unhappily in the heart of man, and present a colouring eminently tragic.’

whom he twice had to dismiss for gross peculation.

True, but he really attacks his critics

Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s La Nouvelle Héloïse, an 800-page novel of love and redemption, at the age of nine, and said ‘It turned my head.’

Alexander the Great, Hannibal, Julius Caesar, Gustavus Adolfus, Prince Eugene and Frederick the Great. This is the only way to become a great captain.’

On the Social Contract at seventeen and adopting Rousseau’s beliefs that the state should have the power of life and death over its citizens, the right to prohibit frivolous luxuries and the duty to censor the theatre and opera.

Yikes

Guibert preached the importance of speed, surprise and mobility in warfare, and of abandoning large supply depots in walled cities in favour of living off the land. Another of Guibert’s principles was that high morale – esprit de corps – could overcome most problems.

Napoleon relies heavily on the idea of speed. He was always attempting to maintain the initiative, and this was also the reason for his rapid push into Russia. Usually, his obsession with supplies and resulting high morale would carry the day, but in Russia, the Grande Arme was simply too large to micromanage at such a scale.

and made him into a profound social conservative.

Napoleon is not a great person, I think it is important to emphasize the profound sexism and racism that pervaded his views.

Napoleon still considered France ‘a foreign country’.

He rather indicates his father did so.

Then in early February an alliance was announced between Austria and Prussia whose unavowed but hardly secret intention was to topple the revolutionary government in France and restore the monarchy.

but simply because the politics of France and of Corsica had profoundly changed and so too had his place within them.

William Pitt the Younger (who had come to power in 1783 at the astonishingly young age of twenty-four) was by then viscerally opposed to regicidal France.

This guy should be considered an architect o Napoleon's Downfall. He pushed for the war, the embargo, and the subsidies.

Lazare Carnot,

Such a paragon was only at ease communing Rousseau-like with nature in the forests, where ‘he felt at peace with himself,

Hopeless romantic

We should try to view Clisson et Eugénie through an eighteenth-century literary prism, rather than as a cheap romance of today.

Ill do my best

This was the first example of what was to become another favoured strategy, the manoeuvre sur les derrières, getting behind the enemy.

Where Napoleon did err, however, was in making the exaggerations so endemic that in the end even genuine victories came to be disbelieved, or at least discounted;

I think that allowing his victories to stand on their own, and only mildly emphasizing most victories would have been a much better strategy. Pick which battles really need to be emphasized, and create a situation in which your losses can be covered up.

but for a few months in Lombardy in the summer of 1796, and later in rural, southern, ultra-Catholic Calabria, there was no mass rebellion against Napoleonic rule

Except for these two rebellions

he asked her not to wash for three days before they met so he could steep himself in her scent.

Weird guy

In the course of these expeditions, Joseph discovered a genuine capacity for diplomacy.

Maybe encourage this role as a diplomat rather than making him king??

When the news arrived that Lusignan had got behind him, staff officers looked anxiously at the preternaturally calm Napoleon, who simply remarked: ‘We have them now.’

Napoleon taught ordinary people that they could make history, and convinced his followers they were taking part in an adventure, a pageant, an experiment, an epic whose splendour would draw the attention of posterity for centuries to come.

He was right. Napoleon may have lost in the end, but he certainly created a 'Napoleonic Legend'

‘Do you suppose,’ he said, ‘that because I’m in the heart of Germany I’m powerless to cause the first nation in the universe to be respected?’

‘I exaggerate all the possible dangers and all the possible harms in the circumstances. I get in a very tiresome agitation. This doesn’t prevent me looking very serene in front of those surrounding me. I’m like a woman who’s giving birth. And when I’m resolved, everything is forgotten except what can make it succeed.’

The key point about Brumaire, however, is not that the Directory was abolished, since it was clearly failing and likely to fall, but that both houses of the legislature were effectively abolished too, along with the Constitution of Year III.

So often, when it came to manipulating battle casualties, or inserting documents into archives, or inventing speeches to the Army of Italy, or changing ages on birth certificates, or painting Napoleon on a rearing horse crossing the Alps, Napoleon and his propagandists simply went one unnecessary step too far, and as a result invited ridicule and criticism of what were genuinely extraordinary achievements.

Point I made before, unnecessary exaggeration.

Moreau simply ignored the order and smoked a cigar ostentatiously on the Tuileries terrace.

the conscription is now effected in places where its very name used to arouse resistance,’

And thus he can raise the grand armé

that were to be the same across all territories administered by France, for the first time since the Emperor Justinian.

???????

Judges were of course required to interpret the law in individual cases but were not allowed to make pronouncements on principles, so that specific cases could not set precedents, as under Anglo-Saxon common law.

That is interesting, essentially removes ability of courts to legislate

In all this, the Code reflects Napoleon’s profound sexism: ‘Women should not be looked upon as equals of men,’ he said. ‘They are, in fact, only machines for making babies.’

He is kinda an incel

Its value and metallic composition remained constant until 1926.

Out of the population of 28 million, 6 million were completely ignorant of the French tongue and another 6 million could only just about make themselves understood in it.

Homogeneity is just a myth

Men already differ enough in their inclinations, their characters and everything that education does not give and cannot reform … Let us have a body of doctrine that doesn’t vary and a body of teachers that doesn’t die.

Could be read in a couple ways

(Napoleon’s understanding of naval affairs was dismal. He never truly grasped that the British ability to fire broadsides far more often per minute made the sheer numbers of ships in any engagement largely irrelevant,

Leclerc had failed to take into account the horrific ravages that malaria and yellow fever would wreak on his army.

Revutions says he did but the outbreak was particularly awful

Yet by the end of his reign, France had reached only the level of industrialization that Britain had enjoyed in 1780, an indictment of revolutionary, Directory and Napoleonic economic policy and the Colbertism they all followed.

fuller quotation shows that he was in fact commending the ‘baubles’ as the physical manifestations of honour.

The heir to the French Revolution’s debts, Napoleon was fighting against a government fuelled by the Industrial Revolution’s profits, which it was willing to share round in support of its cause.

Napoleon visited Marengo on the fifth anniversary of the battle,

I think, at the end, he just got old.

France would train, equip and clothe her armies, after that they were expected to be largely self-financing.

Napoleon didn’t hold a single council of war throughout the entire campaign.

Unity of command

General Louis Suchet.

The deep pursuit of the Prussian forces after Jena was a textbook operation

With 30,000 men and 46 guns, Davout had performed a double envelopment on the 52,000 Prussians with their 163 guns,

Soult

Tenknitten lake

Sénarmont’s action became famous in military textbooks as an ‘artillery charge’, although his gunners suffered 50 per cent casualties.