Napoleon: A Life

by Andrew Roberts

Above all he was no totalitarian dictator, as many have been eager to suggest:

Nor did he want the lands he conquered to be ruled directly by Frenchmen.

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. To them he added rational and efficient local administration, an end to rural banditry, the encouragement of science and the arts, the abolition of feudalism and the greatest codification of laws since the fall of the Roman Empire. At the same time he dispensed with the absurd revolutionary calendar of ten-day weeks, the theology of the Cult of the Supreme Being, the corruption and cronyism of the Directory and the hyper-inflation that had characterized the dying days of the Republic. ‘We

‘There are two ways of constructing an international order,’ Henry Kissinger wrote in A World Restored, ‘by will or by renunciation; by conquest or by legitimacy.’

and was questioned on the New Testament. He later recalled of that test: ‘I was scandalised to hear that the most virtuous men of Antiquity would be burned in perpetuity because they did not follow a religion of which they had never heard.’78

(Winston Churchill once observed that in wartime, truth is so precious that she needs to be defended by a bodyguard of lies.)

you make war,’ he would say to General d’Hédouville in December 1799, ‘wage it with energy and severity; it is the only means of making it shorter and consequently less deplorable for mankind.’79

‘In order to lead an army you have ceaselessly to attend to it, be ahead of the news, provide for everything.’ Napoleon to Joseph, April 1813

‘There is but one step from triumph to downfall. I have seen, in the most significant of circumstances, that some little thing always decides great events.’ Napoleon to Talleyrand, October 1797

‘Winning is not enough if one doesn’t take advantage of success.’ Napoleon to Joseph, November 1808

‘In my opinion the French do not care for liberty and equality, they have but one sentiment, that of honour … The soldier demands glory, distinction, rewards.’ Napoleon to the Conseil d’État, April 1802

punished by blows on the soles of the feet’, a technique known as the bastinado, which was especially painful because of the large number of nerve-endings, small bones and tendons there and was even meted out to women.

Once the revolt was over, on November 11, Napoleon abolished the bastinado for interrogations. ‘The barbarous custom of having men beaten who are suspected of having important secrets to reveal must be abolished,’ he ordered Berthier. ‘Torture

produces nothing worthwhile. The poor wretches say anything that comes into their mind that the interrogator wishes to hear.’89

Perhaps worst of all, people couldn’t see how anything could improve, because revisions of the constitution had to be ratified three times by both chambers at three-year intervals and then by a special assembly at the end of the nine-year process.19 This was unlikely to happen in a legislature as fluid and unstable as that of late 1799, which included covert royalists, Feuillant constitutionalists (moderates), former Girondins, neo-Jacobin ‘patriots’, but precious few supporters of the Directory. By contrast, the constitutions that Napoleon had recently imposed on the Cisalpine, Venetian, Ligurian, Lemanic, Helvetian and Roman republics, along with his administrative reforms of Malta and Egypt, made him look like a zealous, efficient republican who believed in strong executives and central control, solutions that might also work well for metropolitan France.

‘When the house is crumbling, is it the time to busy oneself in the garden?’ Napoleon asked Marmont rhetorically. ‘A change here is indispensable.’22

‘A nation is always what you have the wit to make it,’ he said. ‘The triumph of faction, parties, divisions, is the fault of those in authority only … No people are bad under a good government, just as no troops are bad under good generals … These men are bringing France down to the level of their own blundering. They are degrading her, and she is beginning to repudiate them.’

pusillanimous

‘The masses … should be directed without their being aware of it.’ Napoleon to Fouché, September 1804

‘Caesar was right to cite his good fortune and to appear to believe in it. That is a means of acting on the imagination of others without offending anyone’s self-love.’ Napoleon, Caesar’s Wars

Josephus’ Antiquities of the Jews

‘I like the Muslim religion best; it has fewer incredible things in it than ours.’

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.’15

Despite his own attitudes to the substance of the Christian faith, he was in no doubt about its social utility.

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 He had already shown in Egypt how flexible he was in using religion for political ends;

of religion was common among Enlightenment thinkers and writers. 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

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.’

Antoine Destutt de Tracy (who coined the term ‘ideology’),

On Thursday, March 25, 1802, after nearly six months of negotiations, the Anglo-French peace treaty, to which France’s allies Spain and Holland were also signatories, was finally signed in the hôtel de ville at Amiens.

June 26 when Napoleon signed another treaty, with Turkey, that opened up the Dardanelles to French trade.

The provisions of Amiens were substantially similar to the preliminary treaty, with Britain promising to leave Malta and declare it a free port within three months of ratification, returning the island to the Knights of St John, and to cede its control over Pondicherry, and France regaining her colonies for the price of evacuating Naples, Taranto and those parts of the Papal States such as Ancona that were not in the Italian Republic. Yet Amiens was almost as important for what it left unsaid as for what it actually stipulated. There was no mention of commerce, and although the treaty provided for ‘an adequate compensation’ for the exiled Prince Willem V of Orange-Nassau for the loss of his Dutch estates and revenues when Holland had become the Batavian Republic in 1795, there was no mention of the futures of Holland, Switzerland or Piedmont, or any recognition of the Italian, Ligurian or Helvetian republics. There had been a Franco-Dutch convention in August 1801 which stipulated that French

troops would leave Holland when the general peace was signed, and the Peace of Lunéville guaranteed Swiss independence, so the British didn’t feel the need to address either in the treaty itself. The lack of a commercial treaty attached to the political one meant that the powerful British merchant class soon came to oppose a peace that gave them no privileged access to the markets of France, Holland, Spain, Switzerland, Genoa and (later) Etruria. This has been regarded as a deliberately hostile act by Napoleon, and contrary to the ‘spirit’ of Amiens, but no state is required to enter into a commercial treaty she knows would work to her disadvantage.12 Napoleon wanted to levy tariffs on British imports, and the fact that he didn’t intend to return to the conditions of the badly skewed 1786 Anglo-French trade treaty delighted French merchants in places like Rouen, who could continue to operate behind the French protective tariff – which made British goods more expensive – but also with newly opened seas free of the Royal Navy. France now saw a flourishing of her maritime economy, with raw cotton supplies flooding in from abroad. The prisoner-of-war exchanges were popular in France...

were then to be guaranteed by France, Britain, Russia, Austria, Spain and Prussia, with no French or British to be admitted into the Order, which was now based in St Petersburg as the former grand master had been the assassinated Tsar Paul. But although the Pope appointed an Italian nobleman, Giovanni Battista Tommasi, as grand master in March 1803, the British refused to recognize his rights and exiled him to Sicily. France evacuated all of the possessions stipulated in the treaty even before the three-month time limit, but Britain prevaricated over Pondicherry and Malta, partl...

Although the ten-year term of the Consulate was not due to expire until 1810, in May 1802 a Senate motion to extend it for a second ten-year term passed by sixty to one,

This led to seemingly spontaneous but in fact well-orchestrated calls for a new Constitution of the Year X, under which Napoleon would become First Consul for life. ‘You judge that I owe the people another sacrifice,’ he disingenuously told the Senate. ‘I will give it if the people’s voice orders what your vote now authorizes.’

It was a complete reversal of the principles of the Revolution, yet the French people supported it. The plebiscite’s question was: ‘Shall Napoleon Bonaparte be consul for life?’ and the result, which was fixed even more completely and unnecessarily than that of February 1800, was 3,653,600 in favour to 8,272 against.

Napoleon was duly declared First Consul for life on August 2, with the power to appoint his successor.

Joseph was nominated as

Napoleon’s successor, but on October 10, 1802 Louis and Hortense had a son, Napoléon-Louis-Charles, who was later spoken of as a possible heir (although, with typical viciousness, Louis cast doubts on his own son’s paternity). With Josephine nearing forty, Napoleon had given up expecting an heir from her.

At one of the Conseil meetings in May 1802, when the foundation of the Légion was under discussion, the lawyer Théophile Berlier sneered at the whole concept, to which Napoleon replied: You tell me that class distinctions are baubles used by monarchs, I defy you to show me a republic, ancient or modern, in which distinctions have not existed. You call these medals and ribbons baubles; well, it is with such baubles that men are led. I would not say this in public, but in an assembly of wise statesmen it should be said. I don’t think that the French love liberty and equality: the French are not changed by ten years of revolution: they are what the Gauls were, fierce and fickle. They have one feeling: honour. We must nourish that feeling. The people clamour for distinction. See how the crowd is awed by the medals and orders worn by foreign diplomats. We must recreate these distinctions. There has been too much tearing down; we must rebuild. A government exists, yes and power, but the nation itself – what is it? Scattered grains of sand.124

In order to alter that, Napoleon said, ‘We must plant a few masses of granite as anchors in the soil of France.’ All too often his phrase ‘it is with such baubles that men are led’ has been quoted wildly out of context to imply that he was being cynical, whereas fuller quotation shows that he was in fact commending the ‘baubles’ as the physical manifestations of honour. At that meeting, ten of the twenty-four councillors present voted against the institution of the Légion, because of the way it reintroduced class distinctions; nine of them subsequently accepted either the cross or the title of count.125 (Berlier himself took both.)

‘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

In December 1804 William Pitt signed an alliance with Sweden; once Britain had also signed the Treaty of St Petersburg with Russia in April 1805 the core of the Third Coalition was in place. Britain was to pay Russia £1.25 million in golden guineas for every 100,000 men she fielded against France. Austria and Portugal joined the coalition later.6 Napoleon used his full capacity for diplomatic threat to try to prevent

is not peace that is important but the conditions of peace,’ he

‘Religion is a kind of vaccination, which, by satisfying our natural love for the marvellous, keeps us out of the hands of charlatans and conjurors.

‘The first qualification of a soldier is fortitude under fatigue and privation. Courage is only the second. Hardship, poverty and want are the best school for a soldier.’ Napoleon’s Military Maxim No. 58

‘A father who loses his children finds no charm in victory. When the heart speaks, even glory has no illusions.’ Napoleon on Eylau

Lying