Napoleon: A Life

by Andrew Roberts

the fifteen-year rule of Napoleon saved the best aspects of the Revolution, discarded the worst and ensured that even when the Bourbons were restored they could not return to the Ancien Régime.

The ideas that underpin our modern world—meritocracy, equality before the law, property rights, religious toleration, modern secular education, sound finances and so on—were championed, consolidated, codified and geographically extended by Napoleon.

Napoleon’s threat to invade Britain in 1803 ensured that successive British governments would remain determined to overthrow him.

Napoleon is often accused of being a quintessential warmonger, yet war was declared on him far more often than he declared it on others.

Napoleon’s two greatest heroes, Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar;

‘I was the poorest of my classmates,’ he told a courtier in 1811, ‘they had pocket-money, I never had any. I was proud, I was careful not to show it … I didn’t know how to smile or play like the others.’

At Brienne he had decided not to enter the navy, partly because his mother feared he would drown or be burned to death and she didn’t like the idea of his sleeping in hammocks, but mainly because his aptitude for mathematics opened the prospect of a career in the far more prestigious artillery. Of the 202 candidates from all of France’s military schools in 1784, a total of 136 passed their final exams and only 14 of these were invited to enter the artillery, so Napoleon had been selected for an elite group.

Napoleon’s lifelong distrust of doctors might well have stemmed from this time, as his father’s doctor’s advice had been to eat pears.

Napoleon’s favourites – his ‘pretty girls’ as he later called them – were the relatively mobile 12-pounders.

It was an inauspicious start for the career of the new Caesar, but it taught him the importance of morale, logistics and leadership more powerfully than any number of academic lectures.

One of the accusations made by his detractors was that Napoleon wasn’t personally brave. ‘Cowardice had of late years been habitual to Bonaparte,’ wrote the English writer Helen Williams in 1815, for example.68 This is absurd; not only do cowards not fight sixty battles, but Napoleon came near death several times between battles too, while reconnoitring close to the enemy. The number of people killed near him and the bullet that hit him at the battle of Ratisbon are further testaments to his great physical bravery.

Rarely in military history has there been so high a turnover of generals as in France in the 1790s. It meant that capable young men could advance through the ranks at unprecedented speed.

On December 22, 1793, having been on leave for fifty-eight of his ninety-nine months of service – with and without permission – and after spending less than four years on active duty, Napoleon was made, at twenty-four, a general.

The maritime aspect of grand strategy was always one of Napoleon’s weaknesses: in all his long list of victories, none was at sea.

Besides Toulon, he was to fight the British only twice more, at Acre and in the Waterloo campaign.

But what struck me still more was the sight of a commander-in-chief perfectly indifferent about showing his subordinates how completely ignorant he was of various points of a business which the youngest of them was supposed to know perfectly, and this raised him a thousand cubits in my opinion.

Reforms that Napoleon imposed on the newly conquered territories included the abolition of internal tariffs, which helped to stimulate economic development, the ending of noble assemblies and other centres of feudal privilege, financial restructurings aimed at bringing down state debt, ending the restrictive guild system, imposing religious toleration, closing the ghettos and allowing Jews to live anywhere, and sometimes nationalizing Church property. These modernizing measures, which were repeated in most of the territories he conquered over the coming decade, were applauded by middle-class progressives in many lands beyond France, including by people who hated Napoleon.

I invite scholars to meet and propose what must be done to give science and the arts a new flowering.’

‘If you make war,’ he would say to General d’Hédouville in December 1799, ‘wage it with energy and severity; it is the only means of making it shorter and consequently less deplorable for mankind.’

‘It is astonishing what power words have over men,’

He also ensured that wine from his dinner table was always given to his sentries.

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

His proposers and supporters at the Institut undoubtedly thought it a boon to have the foremost general of the day as a member, but Napoleon was a bona fide intellectual, and not just an intellectual among generals. He had read and annotated many of the most profound books of the Western canon; was a connoisseur, critic and even amateur theorist of dramatic tragedy and music; championed science and socialized with astronomers; enjoyed conducting long theological discussions with bishops and cardinals; and he went nowhere without his large, well-thumbed travelling library. He

Napoleon was admired by many of the leading European intellectuals and creative figures of the nineteenth century, including Goethe, Byron, Beethoven (at least initially), Carlyle and Hegel; he established the University of France on the soundest footing of its history.70 He deserved his embroidered coat.

Turning his thoughts to the invasion of Britain, Napoleon had arranged to meet Wolfe Tone, the leader of the rebel United Irishmen in December to elicit help.

Whatever efforts we make, we shall not for some years gain naval supremacy. To invade England without that supremacy is the most daring and difficult task ever undertaken …

And if none of these three operations is practicable, I see nothing else for it but to conclude peace.75 The Directory were by no means ready to conclude peace, and chose the last of Napoleon’s three alternatives; on March 5 they gave him carte blanche to prepare for and command a full-scale invasion of Egypt in the hope of dealing a blow to British influence in and trading routes through the eastern Mediterranean.

‘Why should we not seize the island of Malta?’

‘This little island is worth any price to us.’

As befitted a member of the Institut, he intended his expedition to be a cultural and scientific event and not merely a war of conquest. To that end he took 167 geographers, botanists, chemists, antiquaries, engineers, historians, printers, astronomers, zoologists, painters, musicians, sculptors, architects, Orientalists, mathematicians, economists, journalists, civil engineers and balloonists – the so-called savants

He pronounced that novels were ‘for ladies’ maids’ and ordered the librarian, ‘Only give them history books.

Men should read nothing else.’

In his six days at Malta Napoleon expelled all but fourteen of the Knights and replaced the island’s medieval administration with a governing council; dissolved the monasteries; introduced street lighting and paving; freed all political prisoners; installed fountains and reformed the hospitals, postal service and university, which was now to teach science as well as the humanities.

The Roman legions protected all religions … The people here treat their wives differently from us, but in all countries the man who commits rape is a monster.’22

The savants’ greatest discovery was the Rosetta Stone, a stele in three languages found at El-Rashid in the Delta.

A full ten days of mourning was ordained for George Washington, who died in December, despite the fact that France and America were still fighting the Quasi-War; in the public eulogies to ‘the American Cincinnatus’, analogies were drawn between Washington and Napoleon.

‘The art of policing is in punishing infrequently and severely,’

Napoleon closed no fewer than sixty of France’s seventy-three newspapers, saying that he wouldn’t ‘allow the papers to say or do anything contrary to my interests’.

Objectionable by modern standards, Napoleon’s move was little other than standard practice for his time and circumstances.

The ‘canteen’ system, whereby groups of eight veterans and eight recruits would march, eat and bivouac together under the command of a corporal, allowed the recruits to learn soldiering fast.

Society is impossible without inequality; inequality intolerable without a code of morality, and a code of morality unacceptable without religion.’

Napoleon instinctively understood that if France was to function efficiently in the modern world, she needed a standardized system of law and justice, uniform weights and measures, a fully functioning internal market and a centralized education system, one that would allow talented adolescents from all backgrounds to enter careers according to merit rather than birth.

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.’45

in November 1809 he set up a unit called the Black Pioneers,

I renounce it with the greatest regret: to attempt obstinately to retain it would be folly.’

Instead, by helping the United States to continental greatness, and enriching the French treasury in the process, Napoleon was able to prophesy: ‘I have just given to England a maritime rival that sooner or later will humble her pride.’95 Within a decade, the United States was at war with Britain rather than with France, and the War of 1812 was to draw off British forces that were still fighting in February 1815, and which might otherwise have been present at Waterloo.

600,000 men (between 11 and 14 per cent of the adult male population) were enlisted in the British army and Royal Navy by the end of 1804, with a further 85,000 in the militia.

the second was a replica of Charlemagne’s crown, which had to be specially made because the traditional French coronation crown had been destroyed during the Revolution and the Austrians wouldn’t lend him Charlemagne’s.

Britain was to pay Russia £1.25 million in golden guineas for every 100,000 men she fielded against France.

In 1794, payments to allies amounted to 14 per cent of British government revenue; twenty years later, with Wellington’s army actually inside France, it was still 14 per cent,