Napoleon: A Life

by Andrew Roberts

‘The apocryphal historians multiply,’ Napoleon wrote in 1807. ‘There is such a vast difference between one book and another on the same subject written in different epochs . . . that he who would seek sound knowledge and is suddenly placed in a vast historical library finds himself thrown into a veritable labyrinth.’ With over fifteen hundred people having recorded their memories of Napoleon in some form or another, that labyrinth is not always easy to navigate. Napoleon has been quoted and misquoted, lionized and pilloried, and his aphorisms plucked at random like passages from Machiavelli’s Prince. His seventy-eight military maxims were not even compiled by him, but rather extracted, entirely out of context, from his correspondence and dictated statements on St Helena.

Too often Napoleon’s virulent opposition to the British government has been ascribed to blind hatred, or a Corsican spirit of vendetta; it could more accurately be seen as a perfectly rational response to the fact that in the decade of his birth the Treaty of Paris of 1763 had cut France out of the great continental landmasses (and markets) of India and North America, and by the time he was a teenager Britain was busily colonizing Australia too.

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.) 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; the phrase ‘to lie like a bulletin’ entered the French language. When

Napoleon respected Islam, regarding the Koran as ‘not just religious; it is civil and political. The Bible only preaches morals.’52 He was also impressed by the way that the Muslims ‘tore more souls away from false gods, toppled more idols, pulled down more pagan temples in fifteen years than the followers of Moses and Christ had in fifteen centuries’.53* He had no objection to polygamy, saying that Egyptian men were gourmands en amour, and, when permitted, ‘will prefer having wives of various colours’.54† His flattery of the ulama (clergy), his discussions of the Koran, and his holding out the possibility of his conversion to Islam – as well as his attempts to impress the sheikhs with French science – were all intended to establish a collaborationist body of Egyptians, with mixed results. As it turned out, no amount of complying with Islamic ceremonies, salutations and usages prevented Selim III from declaring jihad against the French in Egypt, meaning that any attacks upon them were thenceforth blessed.

A major problem with Christianity, as he told Bertrand, was that it ‘does not excite courage’ because ‘It takes too much care to go to heaven.’

Despite his own attitudes to the substance of the Christian faith, he was in no doubt about its social utility. ‘In religion,’ Napoleon told Roederer, one of the few state councillors allowed into the secret of the negotiations, ‘I do not see the mystery of the Incarnation, but the mystery of the social order. It associates with Heaven an idea of equality that keeps rich men from being massacred by the poor … Society is impossible without inequality; inequality intolerable without a code of morality, and a code of morality unacceptable without religion.’

Edward Gibbon famously wrote in the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire that ‘The various modes of worship which prevailed in the Roman world were all considered by the people as equally true; by the philosopher as equally false; and by the magistrate as equally useful.’18 ‘The idea of God is very useful,’ Napoleon said, ‘to maintain good order, to keep men in the path of virtue and to keep them from crime.’19 ‘To robbers and galley slaves, physical restrictions are imposed,’ he said to Dr Barry O’Meara on St Helena, ‘to enlightened people, moral ones.’20

One should not overburden oneself with over-detailed laws,’ Napoleon told the Conseil. ‘Law must do nothing but impose a general principle. It would be vain if one were to try to foresee every possible situation; experience would prove that much has been omitted.’

In an unscripted speech to the Conseil in 1806, which he made only because his education minister, Antoine Fourcroy, hadn’t brought his report to the meeting, Napoleon was almost poetic about how education was the most important of all the institutions, since everything depends upon it, the present and the future. It is essential that the morals and political ideas of the generation which is now growing up should no longer be dependent on the news of the day or the circumstances of the moment … 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.

In one of their more surreal discussions, on the best form of government, the autocrat Alexander argued for an elective monarchy, whereas Napoleon – whose crown was at least confirmed by a plebiscite – argued for autocracy. ‘For who is fit to be elected?’ Napoleon asked. ‘A Caesar, an Alexander only comes along once a century, so that the election must be a matter of chance, and the succession is surely worth more than a throw of dice.’

Lying deep within the French Revolution were the seeds of its own destruction because the concepts of liberty, equality and fraternity are mutually exclusive. A society can be formed around two of them, but never all three. Liberty and equality, if they are strictly observed, will obliterate fraternity; equality and fraternity must extinguish liberty; and fraternity and liberty can only come at the expense of equality. If extreme equality of outcome is the ultimate goal, as it was for the Jacobins, it will crush liberty and fraternity. With his creation of a new nobility Napoleon dispensed with that concept of equality, and instead enshrined in the French polity the concept of equality before the law in which he believed wholeheartedly.

‘In war, men are nothing, but one man is everything,’ Napoleon wrote to Joseph on August 30.100 Long interpreted as an egotistical expression of heartlessness towards his own troops, this was in fact written in reference to Dupont, in a letter full of self-criticism: ‘Up to now we had to look for examples of this only in the history of our enemies; unfortunately today we find it in our own midst.’ Far from being a paean to his own genius, it was in fact a recognition that a bad leader could bring disaster. ‘You

The battle of Borodino – the bloodiest single day in the history of warfare until the first battle of the Marne over a century later – was fought on Monday, September 7, 1812.* ‘The emperor slept very little,’ recalled Rapp, who kept waking him up with reports from the advance posts that made it clear that the Russians hadn’t escaped in the night yet again. The Emperor drank some punch when he rose at 3.a.m., telling Rapp: ‘Fortune is a liberal mistress; I have often said so, and now begin to experience it.’93 He added that the army knew it could only find provisions in Moscow. ‘This poor army is much reduced,’ he said, ‘but what remains of it is good; my Guard besides is untouched.’94 He later parted his tent curtains, walked past the two guards outside and said, ‘It’s a little cold but here comes a nice sun; it’s the sun of Austerlitz.’

Under the cover of darkness, Kutuzov withdrew that night, having lost an immense number of casualties – probably around 43,000, though so dogged was the Russian resistance that only 1,000 men and 20 guns were captured.106 (‘I made several thousand prisoners and captured 60 guns,’ Napoleon nonetheless told Marie Louise.107) The combined losses are the equivalent of a fully laden jumbo jet crashing into an area of 6 square miles every five minutes for the whole ten hours of the battle, killing or wounding everyone on board. Kutuzov promptly wrote to the Tsar claiming a glorious victory, and another Te Deum was sung at St Petersburg. Napoleon dined with Berthier and Davout in his tent behind the Shevardino Redoubt at seven o’clock that evening. ‘I observed that, contrary to custom, he was much flushed,’ recorded Bausset, ‘his hair was disordered, and he appeared fatigued. His heart was grieved at having lost so many brave generals and soldiers.’108 He was presumably also lamenting the fact that although he had retained the battlefield, opened the road to Moscow and lost far fewer men than the Russians – 6,600 killed and 21,400 wounded – he had failed to gain the decisive victory he so badly needed, partly through the unimaginative manoeuvring of his frontal assaults and partly because of his refusal to risk his reserves. In that sense, both he and Kutuzov lost Borodino. ‘I am reproached for not getting myself killed at Waterloo,’ Napoleon later said on St Helena. ‘I think I o...

Larrey amputated two hundred limbs that day. After the battle the 2nd Light Horse Lancers of the Guard, known as the Dutch Red Lancers, spent the night in woods that had been captured by Poniatowski’s infantry, where the ground around the trees was so heavily littered with corpses that they were forced to carry scores out of the way before they could clear a space for their tents.112 ‘In order to get some water it was necessary to travel far from the field of battle,’ wrote the veteran Major Louis Joseph Vionnet of the Middle Guard in his memoirs. ‘Any water to be found on the field was so soaked with blood that even the horses refused to drink it.’113 When the next day Napoleon arrived to thank and reward the remains of the 61st Demi-Brigade for capturing the Grand Redoubt, he asked its colonel why its third battalion wasn’t on parade. ‘Sire,’ came the reply, ‘it is in the redoubt.’114

The next day the main French force resumed its advance after two days’ rest, by which time it was clear that the Russians were not going to fight another major battle in front of Moscow. ‘Napoleon is a torrent,’ Kutuzov said in deciding to surrender the city, ‘but Moscow is the sponge that will soak him up.’4 The Russian army marched straight through Moscow on the morning of the 14th; when it became clear that it was being abandoned, virtually the entire population of the city evacuated their homes in a mass exodus, hiding or destroying anything of use to the invader that they couldn’t carry away with them. Of its 250,000 inhabitants, only around 15,000 stayed on, many of them non-Russians, although looters did come in from the surrounding countryside.5 On September 13, the president of Moscow University and a delegation of French Muscovites had visited Napoleon’s headquarters to tell him that the city was deserted and no deputation of notables would therefore be coming to offer the traditional gifts of bread and salt and to surrender its keys.6 Instead an enterprising old peasant sidled up to offer the Emperor a guided tour of the city’s major places of interest – an opportunity that was politely refused.7 When the soldiers saw the city laid out before them from the Salvation Hills they shouted ‘Moscow! Moscow!’ and marched forward with renewed vigour. ‘Moscow had an oriental, or, rather, an enchanted appearance,’ recalled Captain Heinrich von Brandt of the Vistula Legion...

Napoleon entered Moscow on the morning of Tuesday the 15th, installed himself in the Kremlin (once it had been checked for mines), and went to bed early.* ‘The city is as big as Paris,’ Napoleon wrote to Marie Louise, ‘provided with everything.’10 Ségur recalled how ‘Napoleon’s earlier hopes revived at the sight of the palace’, but at dusk that evening fires broke out simultaneously across the city which could not be contained because of a strong north-easterly equinoctal wind and the fact that the city’s governor, Fyodor Rostopchin, had removed or destroyed all the city’s fire-engines and sunk the city’s fleet of fire-boats before leaving.11 ‘I am setting fire to my mansion’, he wrote to the French on a sign on his own estate at Voronovo outside Moscow, ‘rather than let it be sullied by your presence.’12 (Although he later was fêted for having ordered the burning of Moscow, some of it initiated by criminals he had released from the city’s jails for the purpose, towards the end of his life Rostopchin denied that he had done so, to the bemusement of his friends and family.13) That night the fires were so bright that it was possible to read in the Kremlin without the aid of lamps.

Napoleon was fast asleep on his iron camp bed beneath the chandeliers of the Kremlin when he was woken at 4 a.m. on September 16 and told about the fires. ‘What a tremendous spectacle!’ he exclaimed, watching them from a window whose panes were already hot to the touch. ‘It is their own work! So many palaces! What extraordinary resolution! What men! These are indeed Scythians!’17 (Typically, he reached back to ancient times for an analogy, here to the famously ruthless Persian tribe mentioned by Herodotus who left their Iranian homeland to fight on the Central Eurasian steppes.) He was fortunate not to fall victim to the fires himself, as incompetent guards allowed an artillery convoy – including gunpowder wagons – to draw up under his bedroom window in the Kremlin. If one of the burning brands that were flying around had landed there, Ségur noted, ‘The flower of the army and the Emperor would have been destroyed.’18

Discussing the Russian campaign two years later, Napoleon admitted ‘that when [I] got to Moscow, [I] considered the business as done’.24 He claimed he could have stayed in the well-stocked city throughout the winter had it not been for the burning of Moscow, ‘an event on which I could not calculate, as there is not, I believe, a precedent for it in the history of the world. But by God, one has to admit that showed a hell of a strength of character.’25 Although the part of the city that survived the fire was large enough for winter cantonments, and some supplies were found there in private cellars, it was not remotely capable of wintering an army of over 100,000 men for half a year. There was not enough fodder for the horses, campfires had to be built of mahogany furniture and gilded window-frames, and the army was soon subsisting off rotten horseflesh.26 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 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. According to the figures Napoleon was given at the time, he had lost 92,390 men by the end of the battle of Borodino.27 Yet he did not act like a man whose options were limited. During the two days he spent at the beautiful Petrovsky Palace he considered almost immediately retreating to the Lower Dvina in a circular movement, while sending out Eugène’s corps to make it appear as if he were marching on to St Petersburg.28 He told Fain that he believed he could be between Riga and Smolensk by mid-October. Yet although he started looking at maps and drawing up orders, only Eugène supported the idea. Other senior officers reacted with ‘repugnance’, arguing that the army needed rest, and to go north would ‘look for the winter, as if it wasn’t coming soon enough!’

Another plan, to march on Alexander’s court nearly four hundred miles away in St Petersburg itself, was proposed, but Berthier and Bessières quickly convinced Napoleon on logistical grounds ‘that he had neither time, provisions, roads, nor a single requisite for so extensive an expedition’.32 Instead they discussed marching south nearly 100 miles to Kaluga and Tula, the granary and arsenal of Russia respectively, or retreating to Smolensk. 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. ‘I ought not to have stayed in Moscow more than two weeks at the utmost,’ Napoleon said later, ‘but I was deceived from day to day.’33 This was untrue. Alexander didn’t deceive Napoleon into thinking he was interested in peace; he simply refused to reply either positively or negatively. Nor was Napoleon self-deceived; the burning of Moscow confirmed him in his belief that there was no hope of peace, even though he would probably have accepted as little as Russia’s return to the Continental System as the price.34 The reason he stayed in Moscow for so long was that he thought he had plenty of time before he needed to get his army back to winter quarters in Smolensk, and he preferred to live off the enemy’s resources. On September 18, Napoleon distributed 50,000 plundered rubles to Muscovites who had lost their houses and he visited an o...