Napoleon: A Life

by Andrew Roberts

The most important is that this is the first single-volume general biography to make full use of the treasure trove of Napoleon’s 33,000-odd letters, which began being published in Paris only in 2004.

“Napoleon remade France and much of Europe in his fifteen years in power and proved himself one of history’s greatest military commanders.

a military leader and public administrator of immense skill, energy, and resourcefulness who took control of France through a military coup ‘only six years after entering the country as a virtually penniless political refugee.’

the unknown moody soldier with a craving for suicide who ended the French Revolution, gave France a new constitution, and was crowned emperor.

Napoleon Bonaparte was the founder of modern France and one of the great conquerors of history.

The Légion d’Honneur, an honor he introduced to take the place of feudal privilege, is highly coveted;

The fact that his army was willing to follow him even after the retreat from Moscow, the battle of Leipzig and the fall of Paris testifies to his capacity to make ordinary people feel that they were capable of doing extraordinary, history-making deeds.

his fine sense of humour.

He had an overwhelming crush on her, but she didn’t love him, at least in the beginning, and was unfaithful from the very start of their marriage.

When he learned of her infidelities two years later while on campaign in the middle of the Egyptian desert, he was devastated. He took a mistress in Cairo in part to protect himself from accusations of cuckoldry, which were far more dangerous for a French general of the era than those of adultery.

Napoleon’s second wife, Marie Louise, would also be unfaithful to him, with an Austrian general Napoleon had defeated on the battlefield but clearly couldn’t match in bed.

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 one of the great publishing endeavours of the twenty-first century, the Fondation Napoléon in Paris has since 2004 been publishing every one of the more than 33,000 letters that Napoleon signed.

he had no interest in controlling every aspect of his subjects’ lives. Nor did he want the lands he conquered to be ruled directly by Frenchmen.

‘They seek to destroy the Revolution by attacking my person,’ he said after the failure of the royalist assassination plot of 1804. ‘I will defend it, for I am the Revolution.’

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.

‘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.’

Their decrying of French imperialism was pure hypocrisy as Britain was busy building a vast empire at the time.

Napoleon is often accused of being a quintessential warmonger, yet war was declared on him far more often than he declared it on others.

When asked who was the greatest captain of the age, the Duke of Wellington replied: ‘In this age, in past ages, in any age, Napoleon.’

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.’

whose intellect impressed Goethe.

(Although he admitted in exile to having had ‘six or seven’ mistresses, evidence now points to at least twenty-one.)

Le Mémorial de Sainte-Hélène. It was the greatest international bestseller of the nineteenth century, outselling such other classics as Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

‘I always hate to compare Napoleon with Hitler,’ Winston Churchill told the House of Commons in September 1944, ‘as it seems an insult to the great Emperor and warrior to compare him in any way with a squalid caucus boss and butcher.’

Churchill described Napoleon as ‘the greatest man of action born in Europe since Julius Caesar,’ a plaudit of which Napoleon would profoundly have approved.

‘Hitler did it for the sake of an unbelievably horrible ideal; Napoleon for no underlying purpose at all.’

If he was so evil, I wondered, how was it that he had such a great sense of humour? If he was so ruthless in pursuing Corsican-style vendettas, why didn’t he punish the men who kept on betraying him? If he was such an inveterate warmonger, how was it that twice as many wars were declared on him than he had declared on others? If he was really pursuing continental, or even world, domination, why did he split Europe with Tsar Alexander I at the peace of Tilsit? If he was such a beast, why did so many of the people closest to him write admiring memorials even long after he was dead?

‘The apocryphal historians multiply,’ Napoleon wrote in 1807. ‘There is such a vast difference between one book and another on the same subject written in different epochs . . . that he who would seek sound knowledge and is suddenly placed in a vast historical library finds himself thrown into a veritable labyrinth.’

What brought Napoleon down was not some deep-seated personality disorder but a combination of unforeseeable circumstances coupled with a handful of significant miscalculations: something altogether more believable, human and fascinating.

Napoleone di Buonaparte,

Tuesday, August 15, 1769.

‘I am of the race that founds empires,’

The Italian city-state of Genoa had nominally ruled Corsica for over two centuries, but rarely tried to extend her control beyond the coastal towns into the mountainous interior, where the Corsicans were fiercely independent.

Pasquale Paoli,

Genoa had no appetite for the fight that she knew would be required to reassert her authority over Corsica, and reluctantly sold the island to King Louis XV of France for 40 million francs in January 1768.

Comte de Marbeuf.

at a meeting between Marbeuf and the Corsican gentry, Carlo took an oath of loyalty to Louis XV, as a result of which he was able to retain his positions of responsibility on the island:

Carlo was appointed to represent the Corsican nobility in Paris in 1777, a position that saw him visit Louis XVI at Versailles twice.

French rule over Corsica turned out to be relatively light-handed. Marbeuf sought to persuade the island’s elite of the benefits of French rule, and Carlo was to be one of the prime beneficiaries.

Letizia had thirteen children between 1765 and 1786, eight of whom survived infancy, a not untypical ratio for the day; they were eventually to number an emperor, three kings, a queen and two sovereign princesses.

Once he came to power, Napoleon was generous to his mother, buying her the Château de Pont on the Seine and giving her an annual income of 1 million francs, most of which she squirrelled away.

One of the features that emerges strongly from Napoleon’s correspondence is his deep and constant concern for his family. Whether it was his mother’s property on Corsica, the education of his brothers or the marriage prospects of his sisters, he was endlessly seeking to protect and promote the Bonaparte clan.

His persistent tendency to promote his family would later significantly damage his own interests.

‘To this may be attributed the dark ferocity of his character, which partakes more of Italian treachery than of French openness and vivacity.’

‘a low-bred upstart from the contemptible island of Corsica!’

When the French senate proposed that Napoleon become emperor in 1804, the Comte Jean-Denis Lanjuinais expostulated: ‘What! Will you submit to give your country a master taken from a race of origin so ignominious that the Romans disdained to employ them as slaves?’

there is little doubt that he was a precocious and prodigious reader, drawn at an early age to history and biography.

he found himself a little room on the third floor of the house in which he stayed by himself and didn’t come down very often, even to eat with his family. Up there, he read constantly, especially history books.’

Ancient history provided him with an encyclopaedia of military and political tactics and quotations that he would draw on throughout his life. This inspiration was so profound that when posing for paintings he would sometimes put his hand into his waistcoat in imitation of the toga-wearing Romans.