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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.
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 is often accused of being a quintessential warmonger, yet war was declared on him far more often than he declared it on others.
His decision to invade Russia was not in and of itself his worst mistake. The French had defeated the Russians three times since 1799, so it was understandable that he should believe he could do so again.
‘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
‘The reading of history very soon made me feel that I was capable of achieving as much as the men who are placed in the highest ranks of our annals.’ Napoleon to the Marquis de Caulaincourt
‘I am of the race that founds empires,’ he once boasted.4
Genoa had no appetite for the fight that she knew would be required to reassert her authority over Corsica, and reluctantly sold the island to King Louis XV of France for 40 million francs in January 1768.
Letizia had thirteen children between 1765 and 1786, eight of whom survived infancy, a not untypical ratio for the day; they were eventually to number an emperor, three kings, a queen and two sovereign princesses.
This inspiration was so profound that when posing for paintings he would sometimes put his hand into his waistcoat in imitation of the toga-wearing Romans.
Napoleon took classes from the distinguished trio of Louis Monge (brother of the mathematician-chemist Gaspard),
The French Revolution, which broke out on July 14, 1789 when a Parisian mob stormed the state prison, the Bastille,
Between seven and eight thousand men armed with pikes, axes, swords, guns, spits, sharpened sticks … went to the king. The Tuileries gardens were closed and 15,000 National Guards were on guard there. They broke down the gates, entered the palace, pointed the cannon at the king’s apartment, threw four doors to the ground, and presented the king with two cockades, one white [the Bourbon colour] and the other tricolour. They made him choose. Choose, they said, whether you reign here or in Coblenz. The king presented himself. He put on a red bonnet. So did the queen and the royal prince. They
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On September 21, 1792 France formally declared itself a Republic and the Assembly announced that Louis XVI would be tried for collaboration with the enemy and crimes against the French people. The day before, the Revolution was saved when Generals François Kellermann and Charles Dumouriez defeated Brunswick’s Prussian army at the battle of Valmy in the Champagne-Ardenne region, proving that the citizen army of France could defeat the regular armies of the counter-revolutionary Powers.
On February 1 France declared war on Britain and Holland, shortly after Spain, Portugal and the Kingdom of Piedmont in Italy had declared war on France. Ignoring the verdict of Valmy, the European monarchies were coming together to punish the regicide Republic.
‘When the mob gains the day, it ceases to be any longer the mob. It is then called the nation. If it does not, why, then some are executed, and they are called the canaille, rebels, thieves and so forth.’ Napoleon to Dr Barry O’Meara on St Helena
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.
(Winston Churchill once observed that in wartime, truth is so precious that she needs to be defended by a bodyguard of lies.)
Since the campaign had begun a year earlier, Napoleon had crossed the Apennines and the Alps, defeated a Sardinian army and no fewer than six Austrian armies, and killed, wounded or captured 120,000 Austrian soldiers. All this he had done before his twenty-eighth birthday.
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 whose splendour would draw the attention of posterity for centuries to come.
‘Winning is not enough if one doesn’t take advantage of success.’ Napoleon to Joseph, November 1808
(In one of his coarser turns of phrase, he described the Holy Roman Empire as ‘an old whore who has been violated by everyone for a long time’.
Napoleon knew that Alexander the Great had taken learned men and philosophers along on his campaigns in Egypt, Persia and India. 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
Because the Mamluks traditionally went into battle carrying their life savings, a single corpse could make a soldier’s fortune.
Asked two decades later whether he had ever truly embraced Islam, Napoleon laughingly replied: ‘Fighting is a soldier’s religion; I never changed that. The other is the affair of women and priests. As for me, I always adopt the religion of the country I am in.’51
In an all-too-rare example of poetic justice in history, the French caught the plague off Jaffa’s inhabitants whom they had raped and pillaged.† With a mortality rate of 92 per cent for sufferers, the appearance of its buboes on the body was akin to a death sentence.
‘The masses … should be directed without their being aware of it.’ Napoleon to Fouché, September 1804
Surrounded by these heroes, about half of whom were in togas, had its effect: it was in Jean-Auguste Ingres’ painting of him as First Consul that Napoleon is first seen with his hand tucked inside his waistcoat.71
‘Wishing to be an atheist does not make you one.’
‘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.’16
Since Alexander ultimately did more than any other individual to bring about Napoleon’s downfall, his emergence on to the European scene with his father’s assassination was a seminal moment.
By 1812 Napoleon didn’t believe any colonies could be held in perpetuity, predicting that they would all eventually ‘follow the example of the United States. You grow tired of waiting for orders from five thousand miles away; tired of obeying a government which seems foreign to you because it’s remote, and because of necessity it subordinates you to its own local interest, which it cannot sacrifice to yours.’72 The defeat in Saint-Domingue ended for ever Napoleon’s dreams of a French empire in the West.
Napoleon was duly declared First Consul for life on August 2, with the power to appoint his successor.
At the Treaty of San Ildefonso, Napoleon had promised Spain not to sell Louisiana to a third party, a commitment he now decided to ignore. On the same day that Whitworth called for his passports in Paris, across the Atlantic President Thomas Jefferson signed the Louisiana Purchase, doubling the size of the United States at the stroke of his pen. The Americans paid France 80 million francs for 875,000 square miles of territory that today comprises all or some of thirteen states from the Gulf of Mexico across the Midwest right up to the Canadian border, at a cost of less than four cents an
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Napoleon ordered his officials to treat the pontiff as though he had 200,000 troops at his back, just about his greatest compliment.
‘There is a moment in combat when the slightest manoeuvre is decisive and gives superiority; it is the drop of water that starts the overflow.’ Napoleon on Caesar at the battle of Munda ‘For myself, I have but one requirement, that of success.’ Napoleon to Decrès, August 1805
The many torches held aloft by the troops were mistaken by the Austrians for the burning of the French camp before a retreat, in a classic example of cognitive dissonance, whereby pieces of evidence are forced into a predetermined set of assumptions.
‘Prussia was hatched from a cannonball.’ Attributed to Napoleon ‘When I receive the monthly reports on the state of my armies and my navy, which fill twenty thick volumes … I take greater pleasure reading them than a young lady does in reading a novel.’ Napoleon to Joseph, August 1806
The Holy Roman Empire had a logic to it in the Middle Ages, when it brought together hundreds of tiny German and central European states in a loose agglomeration for mutual trade and security, but after the legal foundations of the modern nation-state had been laid by the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, and once the Imperial Rescript had rationalized Germany in 1803 (and especially once Austerlitz had neutralized Austrian power across much of Germany), it was entirely stripped of its raison d’être.
On July 12, 1806 Napoleon made it yet more irrelevant when he proclaimed himself Protector of a new German entity, the Confederation of the Rhine (Rheinbund), comprising the sixteen client states allied to France, from which Austria and Prussia were notably excluded.
The foundation of the Rhine Confederation had profound implications for Europe. The most immediate was that its members’ simultaneous withdrawal from the Holy Roman Empire meant that the Empire, established by Charlemagne’s coronation in AD 800, was formally abolished by Francis on August 6, 1806.
Meanwhile, the Confederation fostered a nascent sense of German nationalism, and dreams that one day Germany could be an independent state ruled by Germans. There is no more powerful example of history’s law of unintended consequences than that Napoleon should have contributed to the creation of the country that was, half a century after his death, to destroy the French Empire of his own nephew, Napoleon III.
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.
Napoleon ratified the treaty on October 29, by which time French troops were already deep inside the Iberian peninsula. On October 18 Junot had crossed the Bidasoa river into Spain en route to Portugal. He met no resistance even at Lisbon, and on November 29 the Portuguese royal family escaped to Rio de Janeiro in good time on Royal Navy warships, booed at the docks by the crowds for their desertion.
‘Grapeshot and the bayonet cleared the streets,’ Murat reported to Napoleon from Madrid.76 After the insurrection was over, Murat had groups of peasant insurgents shot by firing squad, in scenes later immortalized by Francisco Goya which can today be seen at the Prado.
For all the criticism that was to fall upon Napoleon for his Spanish heist, it is often forgotten that during the same year Tsar Alexander simply took Finland from Sweden in a short but equally illegitimate war. ‘I sold Finland for Spain,’ as Napoleon said, but he got the worst of the deal.
Goethe was to describe his time discussing literature and poetry with Napoleon as one of the most gratifying experiences of his life.
‘To cannon, all men are equal.’ Napoleon to General Bertrand, April 1819
Through intense planning and preparation, Napoleon got this enormous polyglot force – roughly the same number as attacked Normandy on D-Day – across one of Europe’s largest rivers into enemy territory on a single night, with all its horses, cannon, wagons, supplies and ammunition, and without losing a single man.47 It was an astonishing logistical achievement.
