Napoleon: A Life

by Andrew Roberts

‘Where I erred most fatally was at Tilsit,’ Napoleon said later. ‘I ought to have dethroned the King of Prussia.

Not russia??

To this strategically important new entity, however, Napoleon sent as monarch a boy who had achieved nothing in his twenty-two years

His brother! Incredible that a man who "embodied the enlightenment" when on to try to found a european dynasty.

‘We saw Napoleon return from the depths of Poland without stopping,’ recalled Chaptal, ‘convene the Conseil when he arrived and show the same presence of mind, the same continuity and the same strength of ideas as if he had spent the night in his bedroom.’

French family’s noble status simply lapsed if the next generation hadn’t done enough to deserve its passing on.

Lying deep within the French Revolution were the seeds of its own destruction because the concepts of liberty, equality and fraternity are mutually exclusive.

‘but I believe I see that affairs are taking another course from the one I expected.’

Ha an understatement for sure

Years later, Napoleon’s secretary inserted into his memoirs an entirely forged letter, purportedly written by Napoleon to Murat from Bayonne on March 29, 1808, urging caution and moderation.

‘he is indifferent to everything; very materialistic, eats four times a day and hasn’t got a single idea in his head.’

Napoléon-Vendée he was so furious that the houses had only been built from mud and straw that he took out his sword and drove it into one of the walls up to the hilt, before sacking the builder responsible.

Tbh a fucking idiot

Masséna replied by promising to march through the night if necessary, and was as good as his word; his bravery and tenacity during this campaign were extraordinary.

since wagons couldn’t cross the bridge, and the attack stalled after Saint-Hilaire – who had been promised a marshal’s baton – lost his foot to a cannonball (he died fifteen days later when the wound went gangrenous).

He was always leading a critical attack, big loss

By 3.30 p.m. Archduke Charles had concentrated a grand battery of between 150 and 200 guns – the largest in the history of warfare up to that moment

Among their many victims was Lannes himself.

His total losses were estimated at between 20,000 and 23,000 killed and wounded and 3,000 captured,

Anyone other than the Emperor’s brother would have faced a court martial for this decision.

‘No rancour,’ Napoleon said to Macdonald afterwards, in recognition of their past political differences; ‘from today we’ll be friends, and I will send you, as proof, your marshal’s baton that you won so gloriously yesterday.’

Pius behaved with great dignity, but it was a sorry tale of strong-arm tactics with absolutely no advantage for Napoleon. The only material change was that British goods now had to be smuggled into Livorno rather than landing openly on the docks as hitherto.

At the time it seemed that a new kind of Franco-Austrian relationship was necessary to prevent these constant wars of revenge.

Cambacérès denied it, saying that he knew Napoleon would end up going to war with whichever country wasn’t chosen, and ‘I dread a march to St Petersburg more than a march to Vienna.’

Poland for russia...

who had had ‘Death to Kings’ tattooed on his chest,

Yet when the Swedes, who could have been invaluable in any future war against Russia, asked Napoleon’s permission to offer Bernadotte the (eventual) crown, he agreed,

Most of these errors had been unforced, and many of his problems, we can now see, were self-inflicted.

Masséna should have been supported properly, or not sent to Portugal at all; better still, Napoleon should have gone there himself to fight Wellington.

None of his opponents could threaten the existence of the largest European empire since Ancient Rome, larger even that Charlemagne’s. Only Napoleon himself could do that.

By then some 19 per cent of Britain’s exports went to the Iberian peninsula, another reason why Napoleon should have gone back there rather than putting pressure on Russia.19

Truley an administrative and military genius with no understanding of economics (or the navy)

had he not undertaken it, there is no way of knowing how long Britain could have held out against the Continental System.

There are certainly no letters in his vast correspondence that even refer to how he intended to enforce his ban on British trade after the war.

The annexation threw Sweden into the hands of the Russians, with whom she had been at war as recently as September 1809.67 Instead of establishing a useful ally in the north, capable of drawing Russian troops away from his own, Napoleon had ensured that Bernadotte would sign a treaty of friendship with Russia, which he did at Åbo (now Turku, in Finland) on April 10, 1812.

Just tossing allies away and making dumb ones

were limited and possibly even achievable,

Davout had been in favour of stopping at Smolensk, ‘but that Davout, with his usual tenacity, had maintained that it was only at Moscow that we could sign a peace treaty’.70 This was also thought to be Murat’s view, and it was certainly a line that Napoleon was to repeat often thereafter.

Davout's mistake

The central striking force of the Grande Armée had shrunk to less than half its original size in the eighty-two days between crossing the Niemen and entering Moscow.

Still, all the way to moscow in only three months

Napoleon eventually chose what turned out to be the worst possible option: to return to the Kremlin, which had survived the fire, on September 18 to wait to see whether Alexander would agree to end the war.

It was the destruction of the enemy’s main army at Marengo, Austerlitz and Friedland that had secured his victory, and Napoleon had failed to achieve that at Borodino.

One way in which Napoleon could have caused severe problems for the Russian governing class would have been by freeing the serfs from their lifetime of bondage to their aristocratic landowners.

Three major failures to work with the locals. Haiti, poland (and lithuania) and russian serfs.

with only 800 survivors of a corps which had crossed the Niemen with him in June 40,000 strong.

On November 21 the first units of the armed rabble formerly dignified with the name ‘Grande Armée’ reached the 300-foot-wide Berezina,

Napoleon sent Davout off to be governor of Hamburg, a dangerous underuse of his best marshal.

Why tho

having failed to exploit their huge superiority in cavalry.

More research needed into effectiveness of artillery at this time

‘My eagles are again victorious,’ he told Caulaincourt after the battle, adding ominously, ‘but my star is setting.’

Ha

Fouché felt no attachment to Napoleon since his abrupt sacking following his secret peace talks with Britain,

facepalm

(Indeed the codename that the Bourbons’ intelligence service gave him was ‘The Torrent’.)

Leaving Davout to counter non-existent threats from north-west Germany was also a shocking waste of the marshal who had best proved his ability in independent command.

Saint-Cyr’s pressure was slowly tipping the balance.

In a poignant echo, he left from precisely the same jetty that he had arrived at when returning from Egypt fifteen years before.

in an amazing feat of memory, Napoleon recognized a sergeant in the crowd to whom he had given the cross of the Légion on the battlefield of Eylau, who promptly wept.

The unfeigned surprise shown by senior statesmen such as Cambacérès at the news of Napoleon’s return confirms that it was not the result of a widespread conspiracy, as the Bourbons suspected, but of the willpower and opportunism of one man.

The only marshal besides Lefebvre to report for duty at the Tuileries immediately was Davout, even though he had been shamefully underused in the 1813 and 1814 campaigns, tied up in Hamburg rather than unleashed against France’s enemies.

But Napoleon now made a serious error when he appointed Davout war minister, governor of Paris and commander of the capital’s National Guard, thereby denying himself the services of his greatest marshal on the battlefields of Belgium.

As he fought and refought the battle in his mind over the next half-decade, Napoleon blamed many factors for his defeat, but he acknowledged that either he should have given the job of staving off the Prussians to the more vigorous Vandamme or Suchet, or he should have left it to Pajol with a single division. ‘I ought to have taken all the other troops with me,’ he ruefully concluded.71

In the Waterloo campaign that was Wellington, who had made a study of Napoleon’s tactics and career, was rigorous in his deployments, and was everywhere on the battlefield. Napoleon, Soult and Ney, by contrast, fought one of the worst-commanded battles of the Napoleonic Wars. The best battlefield soldier Napoleon had fought before Waterloo had been Archduke Charles, and he was simply not prepared for a master-tactician of Wellington’s calibre – one, moreover, who had never lost a battle.