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‘Napoleon was master in Europe, but he was also a prisoner there.’81
When his attendants begged him to withdraw, he said: ‘They will dine less comfortably than I will lunch.’
Sénarmont’s action became famous in military textbooks as an ‘artillery charge’, although his gunners suffered 50 per cent casualties.
He once took seven shots to kill a cornered stag.)
Napoleon brandy is ill named as he never drank any spirits, habitually taking one cup of coffee after breakfast and another after dinner.
far more of his personal servants volunteered to go into exile with him than the British could allow, a remarkable tribute to his talent as an employer.
‘you are nothing but a shit in silk stockings.’
As with the Wars of the Third and Fourth Coalitions, Napoleon did not want or need this conflict, and was vocal in his desire to avoid it.
It is a myth, however, that Napoleon was a believer in pan-Europeanism;
he had an enemy in the Vatican.
Pius immediately excommunicated the Emperor of the French.
Despite everything he had done for an heir, Napoleon instructed the doctors that if it came to a choice the Empress’s life must be saved rather than the baby’s.
These war aims – even for peace with Britain, against whom America had declared war on June 1 – were limited and possibly even achievable, and certainly far from the lunatic hubris with which Napoleon is generally credited on the eve of his invasion of Russia. There was no word of marching to Moscow, for example (any more than there had been in his supposed heart-to-heart with Metternich). Against the French Empire’s 42.3 million inhabitants, and a further 40 million living in the ‘Grand Empire’ of satellite states, Russia’s population in 1812 was about 46 million.95 Napoleon had fought
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A reasonably accurate total might therefore be 615,000, which was larger than the entire population of Paris at the time.100 It was certainly the largest invasion force in the history of mankind to that time, and very much a multi-national one. Poles made up the largest single foreign contingent, but it also comprised Austrians, Prussians, Westphalians, Württembergers, Saxons, Bavarians, Swiss, Dutch, Illyrians, Dalmatians, Neapolitans, Croats, Romans, Piedmontese, Florentines, Hessians, Badeners, Spaniards and Portuguese.
Napoleon invaded Russia with around 250,000 horses – 30,000 for the artillery, 80,000 for the cavalry and the rest pulled 25,000 vehicles of every kind
Ségur blamed Murat for persuading Napoleon to push on, despite the Emperor supposedly saying, ‘1813 will see us in Moscow, 1814 at Petersburg. The Russian war is a war of three years.’
Napoleon chose to continue chasing Barclay for several perfectly rational military reasons. He had advanced 190 miles in a month and suffered fewer than 10,000 battle casualties; July was absurdly early in the campaigning calendar to order a halt for the year; audacity had always served him well up till then and he would cede the initiative
In retrospect it would have been better for the French had the whole city been razed to the ground, as that would have forced an immediate retreat.
the men had thrown away their winter clothing on the boiling march from the Niemen,
When, years later, Gourgaud tried to blame Murat and Bessières for the route the army took, Napoleon corrected him: ‘No; I was the master, and mine was the fault.’74
Napoleon had lost some 524,000 men, around 100,000 to 120,000 of whom had been captured.
This ceremony used to be attended by band music, but no longer: ‘Musicians had become scarce, since the greater part of them had been buried in the snows of Russia.’
Among the half-million men who fought at Leipzig in ‘The Battle of the Nations’ – the largest battle in European history up to that moment – were French, Germans (on both sides), Russians, Swedes, Italians, Poles, every nationality within the Austrian Empire and even a British rocket section.
Talleyrand’s final defection was only to be expected – he had been planning for it on and off for the five years since Napoleon had called him a shit in silk stockings
As Charles de Gaulle was to observe: ‘Those he made suffer most, the soldiers, were the very ones who were most faithful to him.’
For all his optimism in his letter to Marie Louise, on the night between the 12th and 13th, after dinner with Caulaincourt and Macdonald, Napoleon attempted to commit suicide.
Not committing the Guard at Borodino, staying too long in Moscow and Leipzig, splitting his forces in the Leipzig and Waterloo campaigns and, finally, coming to the decisive engagement on ground which his opponent had chosen: all were the result of Napoleon not following his own military maxims.
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While at Malmaison he applied to the provisional government for a passport to go to America, and asked for two frigates to take him there from Rochefort.
When asked by a visitor how he could recall the details of units that fought in each engagement, he replied: ‘Madam, this is a lover’s recollection of his former mistress.’
Napoleon enjoyed his company and that of his wife, who happened to be a sister of the Captain Elphinstone he had helped the day before Waterloo.
Duke of Wellington
He slept with two of Napoleon’s mistresses – Giuseppina Grassini and Mademoiselle George
