Napoleon: A Life

by Andrew Roberts

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

‘Nations slaughter each other for family quarrels, cutting each other’s throats in the name of the Ruler of the Universe, knavish and greedy priests working on their imagination by means of their love of the marvellous and their fears.’

Britain was to become by far the most consistent of all the opponents of revolutionary and Napoleonic France, with which it was henceforth at peace for only fourteen months of the next twenty-three years.

‘Hommes Sans Peur’ (Men Without Fear)

On December 22, 1793, having been on leave for fifty-eight of his ninety-nine months of service – with and without permission – and after spending less than four years on active duty, Napoleon was made, at twenty-four, a general.

‘Me, I’m very little attached to life … finding myself constantly in the situation in which one finds oneself on the eve of battle, convinced only by the sentiment that when death, which terminates everything, is found amid it, anxiety is folly.’

‘Always trusting myself very much to Fate and destiny, if this continues, my friend, I’ll end up by not getting out of the way when a carriage approaches.’

‘Tragedy excites the soul,’ he later told one of his secretaries, ‘lifts the heart, can and ought to create heroes.’

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

‘Nothing is lost while courage remains.’

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. Eighteen months earlier he had been an unknown, moody soldier writing essays on suicide; now he was famous across Europe, having defeated mighty Austria, wrung peace treaties from

the Pope and the kings of Piedmont and Naples, abolished the medieval dukedom of Modena, and defeated in every conceivable set of military circumstances most of Austria’s most celebrated generals – Beaulieu, Wurmser, Provera, Quasdanovich, Alvinczi, Davidovich – and outwitted the Archduke Charles.

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.

‘Severe to the officers,’ was his stated mantra, ‘kindly to the men.’93

They too tried to bribe Napoleon, this time with 7 million francs. He replied ‘French blood has been treacherously shed; if you could offer me the treasures of Peru – if you could cover your whole dominion with gold – the atonement would be insufficient: the lion of St Mark must lick the dust.’

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