Napoleon: A Life

by Andrew Roberts

Napoleon was able to compartmentalize his life to quite a remarkable degree, much more so even than most statesmen and great leaders. He could entirely close off one part of his mind to what was going on in the rest of it; he himself likened it to being able to open and close drawers in a cupboard.

In 1781, Napoleon received an outstanding school report from the Chevalier de Kéralio, the under-inspector of military schools who, two years later, recommended him for the prestigious École Militaire in Paris with the words, ‘Excellent health, docile expression, mild, straightforward, thoughtful. Conduct most satisfactory; has always been distinguished for his application in mathematics … This boy would make an excellent sailor.’

Asked whether Josephine had intelligence, Talleyrand is said to have replied: ‘No one ever managed so brilliantly without it.’

Society is impossible without inequality; inequality intolerable without a code of morality, and a code of morality unacceptable without religion.’

‘One should render unto God that which is God’s,’ Napoleon was later to say, ‘but the Pope is not God.’

Napoleon’s constant refrain on questions of ‘the general interest’ and civil justice were: ‘Is this fair? Is this useful?’

Everything passes rapidly on earth, with the exception of the mark we leave on history.’

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.

Napoleon had now amassed 130,800 infantry, 23,300 cavalry and no fewer than 544 guns manned by 10,000 artillerymen, three times his force at Aspern-Essling. Captain Blaze recalled that ‘all the languages of Europe were spoken’ on Lobau Island – ‘Italian, Polish, Arab, Portuguese, Spanish, and every kind of German’. Through intense planning and preparation, Napoleon got this enormous polyglot force – roughly the same number as attacked Normandy on D-Day – across one of Europe’s largest rivers into enemy territory on a single night, with all its horses, cannon, wagons, supplies and ammunition, and without losing a single man.47 It was an astonishing logistical achievement. As soon as his men reached the far bank they crossed over the Marchfeld to face Archduke Charles’s army numbering 113,800 infantry, 14,600 cavalry and 414 guns. The battle they were about to fight was the largest in European history up to that point.

Ironically, although it was to get an imperial heir that Napoleon divorced Josephine, it would turn out to be her grandson, rather than any offspring of Napoleon, who would become the next emperor of France and her direct descendants who today sit on the thrones of Belgium, Denmark, Sweden, Norway and Luxembourg. His sit on none.

Many of the phenomena of Napoleonic warfare that had been characteristic of his earlier campaigns – elderly opponents lacking energy, a nationally and linguistically diverse enemy against the homogeneous French, a vulnerable spot onto which Napoleon could latch and not let go, a capacity for significantly faster movement than the enemy, and to concentrate forces to achieve numerical advantage for just long enough to be decisive – were not present or were simply impossible in the vast reaches of European Russia. The Russian generals tended to be much younger than the generals Napoleon had faced in Italy – averaging forty-six years old against the French generals’ forty-three – and the Russian army was more homogeneous than Napoleon’s. This was to be a campaign utterly unlike any he had fought before, indeed unlike any in history.