Napoleon: A Life

by Andrew Roberts

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’.

He was unimpressed that French soldiers failed to haggle successfully in the souks, thinking it a way of ingratiating themselves with the populace, and was disgusted by the way the French dhimmis (infidel) allowed ‘the lowliest Copts, Syrian and Orthodox Christians, and Jews’ to ride horses and carry swords, in transgression of Islamic law.

Napoleon was impressed with the healthy climate and fertile countryside in the regions adjoining the Nile, but contemptuous of its ‘stupid, miserable and dull-witted’ people.

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.’

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.†

Napoleon believed la peste to be susceptible to willpower, telling someone years later that ‘Those who kept up their spirits, and did not give way to the idea that they must die … generally recovered; but those who desponded almost invariably fell a sacrifice to the disorder.’

Napoleon had indeed accomplished ‘the end I had in view’ at the battle of Mount Tabor; the only reason to take Acre had been to pursue his dream of attacking India via Aleppo and setting up a French Empire in Asia stretching to the Ganges, or possibly to capture Constantinople.

Yet, as we have seen, these were romantic fantasies rather than achievable ends, especially once the Syrian Christians made it clear they were going to stay loyal to Jezzar (not least because Smith cleverly collected all Napoleon’s proclamations to the Muslims and gave them to the Syrian and Lebanese Christians).

‘I would found a religion, I saw myself marching to Asia, mounted on an elephant, a turban on my head, and in my hand a new Koran that I would have composed to suit my needs.’

He had to leave fifteen badly wounded men behind in the hospital at Mount Carmel in the care of the monks; all of them were massacred when the Turks arrived, and the monks were driven from the monastery they had occupied for centuries.

When Kléber discovered that Napoleon – whom he took to calling ‘that Corsican runt’ – had left Egypt, the plain-speaking Alsatian told his staff: ‘That bugger has deserted us with his breeches full of shit. When we get back to Europe we’ll rub his face in it.’76 That pleasure was denied him, for in June 1800 a twenty-four-year-old student named Soliman stabbed him to death. (Soliman was executed with a pike driven into his rectum up to his breast.)77

Kléber wrote a devastating report to the Directory denouncing Napoleon’s conduct of the campaign from its inception, describing the dysentery and ophthalmia and the army’s dearth of weapons, powder, ammunition and clothing. But although this document was captured by the Royal Navy it wasn’t published in time to damage Napoleon politically – yet another example of the luck that he was starting to mistake for Fate.

Tragically, the Institut near Tahrir Square in Cairo was burned down during the Arab Spring uprising on December 17, 2011, and almost all its 192,000 books, journals and other manuscripts – including the only handwritten manuscript of Denon’s Description de l’Égypte – were destroyed.

‘The men who have changed the world never succeeded by winning over the powerful, but always by stirring the masses. The first method is a resort to intrigue and only brings limited results. The latter is the course of genius and changes the face of the world.’ Napoleon

The coup wasn’t Napoleon’s brainchild, but that of the Abbé Sieyès, who had replaced Reubell as a Director in May 1799 but who soon concluded that the government of which he was a leading member was simply too incompetent and corrupt to deal with the issues facing France.

It was Talleyrand who finally persuaded a reluctant Sieyès to choose Napoleon on the basis of his irreproachable republican record, and the lack of alternatives.15 To Napoleon he is credited with saying, ‘You want the power and Sieyès wants the constitution, therefore join forces.’

Army officers prize order, discipline and efficiency, each of which Napoleon considered by then to be more important than liberty, equality and fraternity, and at that moment the French people agreed with him.

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

Sieyès clearly saw himself as this philosopher-king, with Napoleon as his consul for war and Ducos for the interior. This was very different from how Napoleon viewed the situation.

By May 1803, some 90 per cent of all émigrés had returned to France, reversing the huge drain of talent that had so weakened the country.

As well as appealing to royalists abroad, Napoleon appealed to them in the Vendée, offering a general amnesty to any Chouans who laid down their weapons. He told them that the ‘unjust laws’ and ‘arbitrary acts’ of the Directory had ‘offended personal security and freedom of conscience’ and offered a ‘complete and total amnesty’ for all past events, in return for which the insurgents were asked to hand in their weapons by February 18, 1800.50

Napoleon instructed General d’Hédouville to deal with the rebels robustly: ‘If you make war, employ severity and activity; it is the only means by which you make it shorter, and consequently less deplorable for humanity.’51

On January 17, 1800, Napoleon closed no fewer than sixty of France’s seventy-three newspapers, saying that he wouldn’t ‘allow the papers to say or do anything contrary to my interests’.

Freedom of the press didn’t exist in Prussia, Russia or Austria at the time, and even in 1819 the British government passed the notorious Six Acts, which tightened the definition of sedition, and by which three editors were arraigned. That was in peacetime, whereas France in January 1800 was at war with five countries, each of which had vowed to overthrow its government. Objectionable by modern standards, Napoleon’s move was little other than standard practice for his time and circumstances.

Royalist writers started praising Napoleon, not least for his tough law-and-order stances which they had long advocated.

it was in Jean-Auguste Ingres’ painting of him as First Consul that Napoleon is first seen with his hand tucked inside his waistcoat.