Napoleon: A Life

by Andrew Roberts

When the Bonapartes moved in, Napoleon took Louis XVI’s first-floor rooms overlooking the gardens laid out by Catherine de Médici, and Josephine took Marie Antoinette’s suite on the ground floor.

From this period can be dated Josephine’s central role in the creation of what became the Empire style, which influenced furniture, fashion, interior decoration and design. She also championed the revival of etiquette after a decade of revolution.

She was astounded to enter the Bonapartes’ bedchamber, with its blue silk upholstery with white and gold fringes, and find that ‘they actually both sleep in one bed’.

‘It was part of the First Consul’s policy’, recalled Laure d’Abrantès, ‘to make Paris the centre of pleasure it had been before the Revolution.’

With exquisitely bad timing, the very day after Napoleon moved into the Tuileries, Louis XVI’s younger brother, the Comte de Provence, who had styled himself King Louis XVIII after the death of his nephew in 1795, wrote to Napoleon from exile at the Jelgava Palace in Courland (present-day Latvia) with a request to be allowed to return to France.

Louis suggested that Napoleon could take any post in the kingdom if he would only restore him to the French throne.

‘You must not wish for your return to France; you would have to march over a hundred thousand corpses. Sacrifice your interest to the peace and happiness of France. History will recognize it. I am not insensitive to the misfortunes of your family … I will gladly contribute to the sweetness and tranquillity of your retirement.’

The finality of Napoleon’s reply to Louis meant that from the autumn of 1800 onwards they started plotting against his life.

In less than fifteen weeks Napoleon had effectively ended the French Revolution, seen off the Abbé Sieyès, given France a new constitution, established her finances on a sound footing, muzzled the opposition press, started to end both rural brigandage and the long-running war in the Vendée, set up a Senate, Tribunate, Legislative Body and Conseil d’État, appointed a talented government regardless of past political affiliations, rebuffed the Bourbons, made spurned peace offers to Britain and Austria, won a plebiscite by a landslide (even accounting for the fraud), reorganized French local government and inaugurated the Banque de France.

Despite his age von Melas was a formidable opponent, a senior lieutenant of the great Russian commander Marshal Alexander Suvorov, who never lost a battle but who had died in St Petersburg on May 18.

He was counting on an element of surprise: no one had taken an army over the Alps since Charlemagne, and before him Hannibal.

one of the wonders of military history.

the battle of Marengo

Then Napoleon struck. Leaving Paris at 2 a.m. only a few hours after the end of the opera, he was in Dijon the next morning, and by 3 a.m. on May 9 he was in Geneva.

It had been a hard winter and the track – there was no road over the St Bernard until 1905 – was icy and banked high with snow, yet Napoleon was extremely lucky with the weather, which was much worse both before the army started crossing the Alps on May 14 and after it had finished eleven days later (half the time it took Hannibal).

To Napoleon’s amusement a letter was intercepted from Melas to his mistress in Pavia telling her not to worry, as a French army could not possibly appear in Lombardy.

Napoleon was playing for far larger stakes than one city; he wanted to kill or capture every Austrian west of Milan.

On June 4 he attended La Scala, where he received a huge ovation, and that night he slept with its star singer, the beautiful twenty-seven-year-old Giuseppina Grassini, with whom Berthier found him breakfasting the next morning.

him in this matter; without religion one walks continually in darkness.’25 Faith, for Napoleon, was an evolving concept, even a strategic one. When he said he adopted the faith of wherever he was fighting at the time he was quite serious, and in northern Italy that meant Roman Catholicism.

Napoleon had worked his three arms of infantry, artillery and cavalry together perfectly at Marengo, but it was still a very lucky victory, won largely by the shock value of Desaix’s arrival on the field at precisely the right psychological moment, and Kellermann’s superbly timed cavalry charges.

Napoleon had made three major errors: in going onto the plain in the first place, in not anticipating Melas’s attack and in sending Desaix so far away.

Berthier’s official history of the battle had to go through three revisions before Napoleon approved it.

Perhaps the best summing up of the battle was Napoleon’s terse statement to Brune and Dumas: ‘You see, there were two battles on the same day; I lost the first; I gained the second.’

On June 16 Napoleon offered Emperor Francis peace once again, on the same basis as Campo Formio, writing: ‘I exhort Your Majesty to listen to the cry of humanity.’ In his Order of the Day he claimed the Austrians had recognized ‘that we are only fighting each other so that the English can sell their sugar and coffee at a higher price’.

Grassini complained that Napoleon’s ‘caresses were on the furtive side’, and often left her unsatisfied, and in this she wasn’t alone. He never took time over his lovemaking, once reporting to an aide, ‘The matter was over in three minutes.’

For all his military genius, intellectual capacity, administrative ability and plain hard work, one should not underestimate the part that sheer good luck played in Napoleon’s career.

In May 1800 there was a gap in the weather for crossing the Alps, and in June the rains slowed Desaix’s march away from Marengo enough so that he could return to the battlefield in time to save his commander-in-chief. In 1792 Colonel Maillard’s report on the events in Ajaccio was swamped under war ministry paperwork on the outbreak of war; in 1793 the pike-thrust at Toulon didn’t go septic; in 1797 Quasdonovich’s ammunition wagon received a direct hit at Rivoli, as Melas’s did at Marengo; in 1799 the Muiron had perfect winds on leaving Alexandria; the same year Sieyès’ other choices for the Brumaire coup were unavailable, and Kléber’s report on the Egyptian campaign didn’t arrive in Paris before the coup, during which Thomé’s sleeve was torn enough to anger his comrades.

Napoleon recognized this, and spoke more than once of ‘the goddess Fortune’. Later in his career he would believe that the goddess was spurning him, but for no...

‘I must give the people their full rights in religion. Philosophers will laugh, but the nation will bless me.’

‘My true glory is not to have won forty battles … What nothing will destroy, what will live for ever, is my Civil Code.’

‘The boldest operation that Bonaparte carried out during the first years of his reign’, wrote Jean Chaptal, ‘was to re-establish worship upon its old foundations.’

Napoleon wanted to ensure that no independent Church would provide a focus of opposition to his rule, and the simplest solution was to co-opt the Pope.

The new Pope, Pius VII, was at heart a simple and holy monk whose views on social questions were not thought to be overtly hostile to the French Revolution.

‘The clergy is a power that is never quiet,’ Napoleon once said. ‘You cannot be under obligations to it, wherefore you must be its master.’

‘In religion,’ Napoleon told Roederer, one of the few state councillors allowed into the secret of the negotiations, ‘I do not see the mystery of the Incarnation, but the mystery of the social order. It associates with Heaven an idea of equality that keeps rich men from being massacred by the poor …

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

Edward Gibbon famously wrote in the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire that ‘The various modes of worship which prevailed in the Roman world were all considered by the people as equally true; by the philosopher as equally false; and by the magistrate as equally useful.’

‘The Government of the Republic acknowledges that the Catholic, Apostolic and Roman religion is the religion of the great majority of French citizens,’ the Concordat began.

Napoleon made a number of concessions, none too onerous. The ten-day week was suppressed and Sunday was restored as the day of rest; the Gregorian calendar eventually returned in January 1806; children were to be given saints’ or classical rather than wholly secular or revolutionary names; salaries were paid to all clergy; orders of nuns and of missionaries were reintroduced in a minor way, and primary education was restored to the clergy’s remit.

On all the major points of contention, Napoleon got what he wanted. With the end of the schism, no fewer than 10,000 Constitutional priests returned to the bosom of the Roman Church and one of the deepest wounds of the Revolution was healed.

It was formally proclaimed with huge pomp at a Te Deum Mass at Notre-Dame on Easter Sunday, April 18, 1802, when the tenor bells rang out for the first time in a decade and Napoleon was received by the recently nominated archbishop of Paris, Jean-Baptiste de Belloy-Morangle.

The Concordat won Napoleon the soubriquet ‘Restorer of Religion’ from the clergy, though few clerics went as far as the archbishop of Besançon, who described him as ‘like God himself’.

The Concordat remained the basis for relations between France and the Papacy for a century. A recent study of Rouen during the Consulate concluded that Napoleon’s most popular measures to have been the Concordat, the defeat of brigandage and the guaranteeing of the land-ownership rights of the acquéreurs, in that order.

At the end of January 1801, Napoleon inaugurated an ambitious project of legal reform whose consequences would outlast even the Concordat.

The Ancien Régime had no fewer than 366 local codes in force, and southern France observed a fundamentally different set of legal principles, based on Roman law, rather than customary law as in the north.

it deserved to be called the Code Napoléon because it was the product of the rationalizing universalism of the Enlightenment that Napoleon embraced.

Essentially a compromise between Roman and common law, the Code Napoléon consisted of a reasoned and harmonious body of laws that were to be the same across all territories administered by France, for the first time since the Emperor Justinian.

One should not overburden oneself with over-detailed laws,’ Napoleon told the Conseil. ‘Law must do nothing but impose a general principle. It would be vain if one were to try to foresee every possible situation; experience would prove that much has been omitted.’

It was imposed on those parts of Spain that were under martial law in 1808 and on Holland after its annexation in 1810.

Aspects of it remain in a quarter of the world’s legal systems as far removed from the mother country as Japan, Egypt, Quebec and Louisiana.