Napoleon: A Life

by Andrew Roberts

Although his conquests ended in defeat and ignominious imprisonment, over the course of his short but eventful life he fought sixty battles and lost only seven. For any general, of any age, this was an extraordinary record. Yet his greatest and most lasting victories were those of his institutions, which put an end to the chaos of the French Revolution and cemented its guiding principle of equality before the law. Today the Napoleonic Code forms the basis of law in Europe and aspects of it have been adopted by forty countries spanning every continent except Antarctica. Napoleon’s bridges, reservoirs, canals and sewers remain in use throughout France. The French foreign ministry sits above the stone quays he built along the Seine, and the Cour des Comptes still checks public spending accounts more than two centuries after he founded it. The Légion d’Honneur, an honor he introduced to take the place of feudal privilege, is highly coveted; France’s top secondary schools, many of them founded by Napoleon, provide excellent education and his Conseil d’État still meets every Wednesday to vet laws. Even if Napoleon hadn’t been one of the great military geniuses of history, he would still be a giant of the modern era.

Above all he was no totalitarian dictator, as many have been eager to suggest: he may have established an unprecedentedly efficient surveillance system, but he had no interest in controlling every aspect of his subjects’ lives. Nor did he want the lands he conquered to be ruled directly by Frenchmen. He believed that one can control foreign lands only by winning over the population and sought accordingly to present himself in terms that would make him sympathetic to the locals, feigning sympathy for their religion as a means to an end.

When asked who was the greatest captain of the age, the Duke of Wellington replied: ‘In this age, in past ages, in any age, Napoleon.’

Napoleon certainly never lacked confidence in his own capacity as a military leader. On St Helena, when asked why he had not taken Frederick the Great’s sword when he had visited Sans Souci, he replied, ‘Because I had my own.’

Although he was often self-deprecating in private and admitted the mistakes that led to his myriad disasters to his friends and secretaries, he chose not to do so in his memoirs.

When I was a schoolboy in Britain in the 1970s, I was taught this negative view of Napoleon, but never really believed it. If he was so evil, I wondered, how was it that he had such a great sense of humour? If he was so ruthless in pursuing Corsican-style vendettas, why didn’t he punish the men who kept on betraying him? If he was such an inveterate warmonger, how was it that twice as many wars were declared on him than he had declared on others? If he was really pursuing continental, or even world, domination, why did he split Europe with Tsar Alexander I at the peace of Tilsit? If he was such a beast, why did so many of the people closest to him write admiring memorials even long after he was dead? If he was Hitler-in-the-making, why did so many intelligent and liberal-minded Britons visit him in Paris, on Elba and at St Helena?

‘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.’ Napoleon, on François-Just-Marie Raynouard’s play The Templars

Later in life, Napoleon urged his junior officers ‘to read and re-read the campaigns of Alexander the Great, Hannibal, Julius Caesar, Gustavus Adolfus, Prince Eugene and Frederick the Great.

A month later, Napoleon described his father in a letter to his great-uncle Luciano as ‘an enlightened, zealous and disinterested citizen. And yet Heaven let him die; and in what a place? A hundred leagues from his native land – in a foreign country, indifferent to his existence, far from all he held precious.’58 This letter is interesting not just for its laudable filial feeling, but for the fact that Napoleon still considered France ‘a foreign country’.

He then made a self-mocking joke which has been drained of all comic charm by being taken seriously by historians: ‘Always trusting myself very much to Fate and destiny, if this continues, my friend, I’ll end up by not getting out of the way when a carriage approaches.’19

His favourite entertainments were intellectual rather than social; he went to public lectures and visited the observatory, the theatre and the opera. ‘Tragedy excites the soul,’ he later told one of his secretaries, ‘lifts the heart, can and ought to create heroes.’24

His cavalry was posted in the Place de la Révolution (today’s Place de la Concorde).48 He then spent three hours visiting each of his guns in turn. ‘Good and upstanding people must be persuaded by gentle means,’ Napoleon would later write. ‘The rabble must be moved by terror.’49

Vaunting ambition can be a terrible thing, but if allied to great ability – a protean energy, grand purpose, the gift of oratory, near-perfect recall, superb timing, inspiring leadership – it can bring about extraordinary outcomes.

Napoleon has been criticized for lying in his post-battle reports, but it is absurd to ascribe conventional morality to these reports since disinformation has been an acknowledged weapon of war since the days of Sun-tzu. (Winston Churchill once observed that in wartime, truth is so precious that she needs to be defended by a bodyguard of lies.)

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. Voltaire’s view that European civilization was on a progressive course was fairly universally held in France in Napoleon’s time, and underlay his civilizing mission. Where he abolished the Inquisition, obscure feudal practices, anti-Semitic regulations and restraints on trade and industry such as the guilds, Napoleon also brought genuine enlightenment to peoples who, without his armies’ victories, would have remained often without rights or equality before the law.

To this end he appointed two new aides-de-camp to join Junot, Marmont, Muiron and Murat. These were Joseph Sulkowski, a Polish captain in the revolutionary army, and Géraud Duroc, an artillery officer who had shown his efficiency as General Augustin de Lespinasse’s aide-de-camp. Napoleon was years later to describe Duroc as ‘the only man who had possessed his intimacy and entire confidence’.84

Napoleon was capable of compartmentalizing his life, so that one set of concerns never spilled over into another – probably a necessary attribute for any great statesman, but one he possessed to an extraordinary degree. ‘Different subjects and different affairs are arranged in my head as in a cupboard,’ he once said. ‘When I wish to interrupt one train of thought, I shut that drawer and open another. Do I wish to sleep? I simply close all the drawers, and there I am – asleep.’92 An aide-de-camp wrote of how much his staff ‘admired the strength of mind and the facility with which he could take off or fix the whole force of his attention on whatever he pleased’.93 In the middle of this hurricane in his private life and the growing, gnawing realization that the woman he worshipped was at best lukewarm in her affections towards him, Napoleon was putting the finishing touches to a bold campaign plan that would lead to a string of seven more victories on top of the five already won, the capture of Mantua and the expulsion of Austria from Italy after three centuries of Habsburg rule.