Napoleon: A Life

by Andrew Roberts

‘We have done with the romance of the Revolution,’ he told an early meeting of his Conseil d’Etat, ‘we must now commence its history.’

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.’

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.

Another dead hero was Charles XII of Sweden, who from 1700 to 1706 had destroyed the armies of four states joined in coalition against him, but then marched deep into Russia, only to be catastrophically defeated and forced into exile.

He idolized Rousseau, who wrote positively about Corsica, writing a paean to On the Social Contract at seventeen and adopting Rousseau’s beliefs that the state should have the power of life and death over its citizens, the right to prohibit frivolous luxuries and the duty to censor the theatre and opera.

Napoleon’s upbringing imbued him with a reverence for social hierarchy, law and order, and a strong belief in reward for merit and courage, but also a dislike of politicians, lawyers, journalists and Britain.

thereafter. Despite being taught by monks, he was never a true Christian, being unconvinced by the divinity of Jesus. He did believe in some kind of divine power, albeit one that seems to have had very limited interaction with the world beyond its original creation.

Later he was sometimes seen to cross himself before battle,77 and, as we shall see, he certainly also knew the social utility of religion.

But in his personal beliefs he was essentially an Enli...

God helps those who help himself, I approve of that idea myself.

‘There is nothing in the military profession I cannot do for myself,’ Napoleon was to boast. ‘If there is no-one to make gunpowder, I know how to make it; gun carriages, I know how to construct them; if it is founding a cannon, I know that; or if the details of tactics must be taught, I can teach them.’

A few days after the successful conclusion of the shell-testing project, Napoleon wrote the first paragraph of his ‘Dissertation sur l’Autorité Royale’, which argued that military rule was a better system of government than tyranny and concluded, unambiguously: ‘There are very few kings who would not deserve to be dethroned.’

Napoleon thought of the king’s execution – followed in October by that of Marie Antoinette – as a tactical error. ‘Had the French been more moderate and not put Louis to death,’ he later opined, ‘all Europe would have been revolutionized: the war saved England.’

Yet at the time he publicly supported what had been done, and started his letters with the republican address ‘Citizen’.

Britain saw an opportunity to use her maritime power to sweep French trade from the world’s oceans, neutralize or capture French colonies and cement her position as the world’s greatest commercial power

after her humiliation in America only a decade earlier.

The maritime aspect of grand strategy was always one of Napoleon’s weaknesses: in all his long list of victories, none was at sea.

‘Life is like an empty dream which vanishes,’

Désirée’s rejection of Napoleon contributed to his deep cynicism about women and even about love itself. On St Helena he defined love as ‘the occupation of the idle man, the distraction of the warrior, the stumbling block of the sovereign’, and told one of his entourage: ‘Love does not really exist. It’s an artificial sentiment born of society.’

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

‘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 submissive and humble as they ought to be.’

‘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.

‘That little bastard of a general actually frightened me!’ Augereau would later tell Masséna.11

Often in the future he would blame Austrian, British and Russian armies for pillaging in a manner that he must have known his army had on many occasions greatly exceeded.*

Armies moved much faster at the end of the eighteenth century than at the beginning due to improved road surfaces

As the pro-Bonapartist English writer and translator Anne Plumptre pointed out at the time, much of what the French were removing were objects that Romans such as the consul Lucius Mummius had themselves taken from places like Corinth and Athens.

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.

As a rule, the educated, professional and secularized elites were more likely to regard Napoleon as a liberating force than the Catholic peasantry, who saw the French armies as foreign atheists.

‘All men of genius, everyone distinguished in the republic of letters, is French, whatever his nationality,’

78 ‘If 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.’

The French were starting to bring about a political unity to a peninsula that hadn’t known it for centuries.

with oak leaves and acorns, and a figure representing the ‘Genius of War’ on the reverse.

To encourage his men he denounced Charles’s brother, the Emperor Francis, in one of his proclamations as ‘the paid servant of the merchants of London’ and claimed that the British, ‘strangers to the ills of war, smile with pleasure at the woes of the Continent’.

77 This line of attack in Napoleon’s propaganda war against Austria came because the British government was about to furnish Austria with a £1.62 million loan, the equivalent of more than 40 million francs.

‘In war,’ he was to say in 1808, ‘moral factors account for three-quarters of the whole; relative material strength accounts for only one-quarter.’

Napoleon’s rhetorical inspiration came mostly from the ancient world, but Shakespeare’s St Crispin Day’s speech from Henry V can also be detected in such lines as ‘Your countrymen will say as they point you out, “He belonged to the Army of Italy.” ’92 The avalanche of praise he generally lavished on his troops was in sharp contrast to the acerbic tone he adopted towards generals, ambassadors, councillors, ministers and indeed his own family in private correspondence. ‘Severe to the officers,’ was his stated mantra, ‘kindly to the men.’

‘Winning is not enough if one doesn’t take advantage of success.’

‘In my opinion the French do not care for liberty and equality, they have but one sentiment, that of honour

‘Our Government must destroy the Anglican monarchy, or expect itself to be destroyed by the corruption of these intriguing and enterprising islanders. The present moment offers us a fine opportunity. Let’s concentrate all our activity upon the naval side and destroy England. That done, Europe is at our feet.’

“Vive Bonaparte! Vive the Pacificator!”

Napoleon understood the power that spectacle held over the public imagination, and wanted the new French Republic to make the same visual impact that the old European monarchies enjoyed.

Placing oneself in the limelight while seeming modestly to edge away from it is one of the most skilful of all political moves, and Napoleon had mastered it perfectly.

‘Europe is but a molehill,’ a delighted Napoleon told his private secretary, ‘all the great reputations have come from Asia.’77

‘If I had stayed in the East, I would have founded an empire, like Alexander.’

‘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.’9

Napoleon was not afraid to invoke the deity – even to appear to take the side of the Muslims against the Pope – if it would serve his purpose and win over the population.

25 The young artillery staff lieutenant Jean-Pierre Doguereau never forgot how hard it was to move cannon in the soft sand, where they could sink up to their axles. ‘Well, general, are you going to take us to India like this?’ shouted a soldier at Napoleon, only to receive the reply: ‘No, I wouldn’t undertake that with soldiers such as you!’26

The Great Pyramid of Cheops at Giza, the tallest building in the world until the twentieth century, was clearly visible nearly 9 miles away, and Napoleon referred to it in his pre-battle Order of the Day: ‘Soldiers! You came to this country to save the inhabitants from barbarism, to bring civilization to the Orient and subtract this beautiful part of the world from the domination of England. From the top of those pyramids, forty centuries are contemplating you.’

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