Napoleon: A Life

by Andrew Roberts

Napoleon represented the Enlightenment on horseback.

Many of those who opposed him were forced to adopt aspects of his reforms in their own countries in order to defeat 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.

It was thus Colbertian protectionism that brought him down, far more than the bloodlust and egomania of which he is so often accused.

He could not have known how to block the ravages of the typhus epidemic that killed around 100,000 men in his central striking force as its origins and cure would not be discovered for another century.

Churchill described Napoleon as ‘the greatest man of action born in Europe since Julius Caesar,’

Napoleon’s legacy is one of the most fiercely debated in all of modern historiography

‘History is an argument without end,’ Geyl said, believing that every generation has to write its own biography of Napoleon.

What brought Napoleon down was not some deep-seated personality disorder but a combination of unforeseeable circumstances coupled with a handful of significant miscalculations: something altogether more believable, human and fascinating.

‘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

His acceptance of the revolutionary principles of equality before the law, rational government, meritocracy, efficiency and aggressive nationalism fit in well with this ethos but he had little interest in equality of outcome, human rights, freedom of the press or parliamentarianism, all of which, to his mind, did not.

‘My fellow-countrymen are weighed down with chains, while they kiss with fear the hand that oppresses them!

he attacked a Protestant minister from Geneva who had criticized Rousseau, and accused Christianity of permitting tyranny because its promises of an afterlife detracted from Man’s desire to perfect this life by insisting on a government designed ‘to lend assistance to the feeble against the strong, and by this means to allow everyone to enjoy a sweet tranquillity, the road to happiness’.

Nobody better understood the psychology of the ordinary soldier.

‘Good and upstanding people must be persuaded by gentle means,’ Napoleon would later write. ‘The rabble must be moved by terror.’49

Napoleon prepared to use grapeshot, the colloquial term for canister or case shot, which consists of hundreds of musket balls packed into a metal case that rips open as soon as it leaves the cannon’s muzzle, sending the lead balls flying in a relatively wide arc at an even greater velocity than the 1,760 feet per second of a musket shot. Its maximum range was roughly 600 yards, optimum 250. The use of grapeshot on civilians was hitherto unknown in Paris, and was testament to Napoleon’s ruthlessness that he was willing to contemplate it.

‘If you treat the mob with kindness,’ he told Joseph later, ‘these creatures fancy themselves invulnerable; if you hang a few, they get tired of the game, and become as submissi...

Only at 4 p.m. did the rebel columns start issuing from side streets to the north of the Tuileries. Napoleon did not open fire immediately, but as soon as the first musket shots were heard from the Sections sometime between 4.15 p.m. and 4.45 p.m. he unleashed a devastating artillery response. He also fired grapeshot at the men of the Sections attempting to cross the bridges over the Seine, who took heavy casualties and quickly fled. In most parts of Paris the attack was all over by 6 p.m., but at the church of Saint-Roch in the rue Saint-Honoré, which became the de facto headquarters of the insurrection and where the wounded were brought, snipers carried on firing from rooftops and from behind barricades. The fighting continued for many hours, until Napoleon brought his cannon to within 60 yards of the church and surrender was the only option.51 Around three hundred insurrectionists were killed that day, against only half a dozen of Napoleon’s men.

‘The whiff of grapeshot’ – as it became known – meant that the Paris mob played no further part in French politics for the next three decades.

Napoleon had been promoted to général de division by Barras and soon afterwards to commander of the Army of the Interior in recognition of his service in saving the Republic and possibly preventing civil war.

when a lady asked him how he could have fired so mercilessly on the mob he replied: ‘A soldier is only a machine to obey orders.’

‘Living off the land’ allowed Napoleon a speed of manoeuvre that was to become an essential element of his strategy. ‘The strength of the army,’ he stated, ‘like power in mechanics, is the product of multiplying the mass by the velocity.’32 He encouraged everything that permitted faster movement, including the use of forced marches which more or less doubled the 15 miles per day a demi-brigade could move. ‘No man ever knew how to make an army march better than Napoleon,’ recalled one of his officers. ‘These marches were frequently very fatiguing; sometimes half the soldiers were left behind; but, as they never lacked goodwill, they did arrive, though they arrived later.’33

Napoleon’s armies to move at what he calculated to be twice the speed of Julius Caesar’s.

Napoleon wanted to compensate the German princes who were going to lose lands to France under the treaty, posing as the protector of the medium-sized German states against the designs of Austria and Prussia. As he had presciently put it in a letter to the Directory on May 27: ‘If the concept of Germany didn’t exist, we would need to invent it for our own purposes.’

Napoleon said: ‘The true conquests, the only ones that cause no regret, are those made over ignorance.’

there was not a drummer in the army but would respect me the more for believing me to be not a mere soldier,’

‘Savants and intellectuals are like coquettes,’ Napoleon was later to tell Joseph; ‘one may see them and talk with them, but don’t make one your wife or your minister.’

‘The fate of a battle is the result of a single instant – a thought,’ Napoleon was later to say about Marengo.

Napoleon to divide his army into units of 20,000 to 30,000 men, sometimes up to 40,000, and to train them intensely. Each corps was effectively a mini-army, with its own infantry, cavalry, artillery, staff, intelligence, engineering, transport, victualling, pay, medical and commissary sections, intended to work in close connection with other corps. Moving within about one day’s march of each other, they allowed Napoleon to swap around the rearguard, vanguard or reserve at a moment’s notice, depending on the movements of the enemy. So, in either attack or retreat, the whole army could pivot on its axis without confusion. Corps could also march far enough apart from each other not to cause victualling problems in the countryside. Each corps needed to be large enough to fix an entire enemy army into position on the battlefield, while the others could descend to reinforce and relieve it within twenty-four hours, or, more usefully, outflank or possibly even envelop the enemy.

was an inspired system, originally the brainchild of Guibert and Marshal de Saxe.40 Napoleon employed it in almost all his coming victories – most notably at Ulm, Jena, Friedland, Lützen, Bautzen and Dresden – not wishing to relive the perils of Marengo where his forces had been too widely spread. His defeats – particularly at Aspern-Essling, Leipzig and Waterloo – would come when he failed to employ the corps system properly.

Napoleon pioneered an operational level of warfare that lies between strategy and tactics. His corps became the standard unit adopted by every European army by 1812, and which lasted until 1945. It was his unique contribution to the art of war, and its first use in 1805 can be regarded as heralding the birth of modern warfare.

The word ‘impatience’ recurs often in Ségur’s narrative, and might almost be considered the most constant of all Napoleon’s military, indeed personal, traits. Of those closest to him on this campaign

‘Napoleon was master in Europe, but he was also a prisoner there.’

Napoleon continued to spend huge amounts of money, time and energy trying to rebuild a fleet that he believed could threaten Britain again through sheer numbers. He never understood that a fleet which spent seven-eighths of its time in port simply could not gain the seamanship necessary to take on the Royal Navy at the height of its operational capacity.

On the afternoon of October 13, as Napoleon rode through Jena, he was spotted by the philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel from his study window. Hegel, who was writing the last pages of The Phenomenology of Spirit, told a friend that he had seen ‘the Emperor, this Weltseele [world-soul] ride out of town … Truly it is a remarkable sensation to see such an individual on horseback, raising his arm over the world and ruling it.’102 In his Phenomenology Hegel posited the existence of the ‘beautiful soul’, a force that acts autonomously in disregard of convention and others’ interests, which, it has been pointed out, was ‘not a bad characterisation’ of Napoleon himself.

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.

Napoleon never minded people disagreeing with him, so long as they did it in a loyal spirit and in private: ‘He never resented anyone who frankly showed opposition to his opinion; he liked his opinions to be discussed.’

Napoleon took advantage of being in Erfurt to meet his greatest living literary hero, who lived only 15 miles away in Weimar. On October 2, 1808, Goethe lunched with Napoleon at Erfurt, with Talleyrand, Daru, Savary and Berthier in attendance. As he entered the room, the Emperor exclaimed, ‘Voilà un homme!’ (Here’s a man!), or possibly ‘Vous êtes un homme!’ (You’re a man!).

Napoleon told him he felt that French theatre had strayed too far from nature and truth. ‘What have we now to do with Fate?’ he asked, referring to plays in which prearranged destiny formed the determining agency. ‘Politics is fate.’

the Emperor told the author that tragedy ‘should be the training ground of kings and peoples, and is the highest achievement of the poet’.

He went on to denounce Tacitus’ prejudices, obscurantism and ‘detestable style’, and also the way that Shakespeare mixed comedy with tragedy, ‘the terrible with the burlesque’, and expressed his surprise that such a ‘great spirit’ as Goethe could admire such undefined genres.

Goethe was to describe his time discussing literature and poetry with Napoleon as one of the most gratifying experiences of his life.

‘There must be a superior power which dominates all the other powers,’ Napoleon baldly stated, ‘with enough authority to force them to live in harmony with one another – and France is best placed for that purpose.’1

In his belief in rational progress and in the possibility of beneficent dictatorship, Napoleon was the last of the Enlightened absolutists who had emerged so frequently in Europe since the late seventeenth century; his own reverence for its most famous exemplar, Frederick the Great, underscored this identification. He believed, as many Frenchmen did, that modern ideas of governance could be spread across Europe through the agency of the Grande Armée.

‘You have nothing but special laws,’ he told an Italian delegation at Lyons in 1805, ‘henceforth you must have general laws. Your people have only local habits; it is necessary that they should take on national habits.’3 For many German and Italian public officials, Napoleon’s Empire, in the words of the British historian H. A. L. Fisher, ‘shattered the obdurate crust of habit and substituted wide ideals of efficient combination for narrow, slovenly, lethargic provincialism’.4 By 1810 he was moving towards a progressive unitary Empire with uniform laws based on the Napoleonic Code, enlightened secularism and religious toleration, equality before the law, and uniform weights, measures and currency.

If his system was to work smoothly, what it most needed was time.

To large numbers of people across Europe Napoleon seemed to represent the ideas of progress, meritocracy and a rational future. When Count Maximilian von Montgelas, effectively the prime minister of Bavaria, secularized the monasteries, introduced compulsory education and vaccination, instituted examinations for the civil service, abolished internal tolls and extended civil rights to Jews and Protestants there between 1806 and 1817, he did so because it conformed to what he called the Zeitgeist (spirit of the age).13 Why should an Italian, Dutch, Belgian or German lawyer, doctor, architect or businessman prefer to be ruled by some inbred princeling than by Napoleon, a member of the Institut de France who believed in opening careers to the talents? Of course practically they often had little choice but to serve the French in the short term, but for many the advent of French military victory gave them an opportunity to adopt modern practices from a revolutionary system shorn of the guillotine and the Terror. Nor were they required to like Napoleon or the French to appreciate that their ways were more efficient.

If I do not wish for war, and if I am far from desiring to be the Don Quixote of Poland, I have the right to insist upon Russia remaining faithful to the alliance.

Napoleon failed to take into account the fact that he would be fighting a very different Russian army from earlier ones, though one with the same doggedness that had aroused his admiration at Pultusk and Golymin. Over half of the Russian officer corps were seasoned veterans and one-third had fought in six or more battles. Russia had changed, but Napoleon had not noticed. So while not actively seeking war, Napoleon was more than willing to ‘pick up the gauntlet’ that was thrown down by Alexander’s ukaz.

‘True heroism consists of being superior to the ills of life, in whatever shape they may challenge to the combat.’