Napoleon: A Life

by Andrew Roberts

The silver one-franc piece was to weigh five grams, and quickly became western Europe’s standard unit of currency. Its value and metallic composition remained constant until 1926.

Although Napoleon didn’t have particularly good French himself he knew from personal experience how important it was to speak the language in order to get on.56 His educational reforms made French the only permitted language of instruction, as it became for all official documents.

The Sorbonne had been closed by the Revolution, but in 1808 Napoleon resuscitated it.

‘We have done with the romance of the Revolution,’ he told an early meeting of his Conseil État, ‘we must now commence its history.’

Other than on the battlefield itself, it was here that Napoleon was at his most impressive.

to his deliberative powers, his dynamism, the speed with which he grasped a subject, and the tenacity never to let it go until he had mastered its essentials and taken the necessary decision.

Napoleon made little effort to conceal his role-model as a lawgiver, civil engineer and nation-builder.

Although it is too early to say whether the institutions Napoleon put in place will last as long as Caesar’s, he clearly put down what he called ‘some masses of granite as anchors in the soul of France’.

Although peace terms were being negotiated with Austria from as early as July, they wouldn’t be signed until Moreau inflicted a crushing defeat on Archduke Johann at Hohenlinden on December 3, capturing 8,000 prisoners, 50 guns and 85 ammunition and baggage wagons.

The end of the Quasi-War with America came on October 3, with a treaty negotiated by Joseph and signed at Mortefontaine, his chateau on the Loire. This meant that France no longer had to face the threat of a nascent American navy co-operating with the British Royal Navy.

in return Spain would cede Louisiana (then a vast territory covering land in thirteen modern-day US states from the Gulf of Mexico to the Canadian border) to France.* Under one of the provisions of San Ildefonso, France promised not to sell Louisiana to a third power.

Just after 8 p.m. on Wednesday, December 24, 1800, Napoleon and Josephine took separate carriages to the Opéra to listen to Haydn’s oratorio The Creation.

machine infernale,

Police reports began to indicate that the public assumed Napoleon would indeed be assassinated sooner or later.

Six years after his imprisonment in 1794 for his Jacobin loyalties Napoleon now believed them to be enemies of the state even more dangerous than the Chouan assassins, because of their ideology, familiarity with power and superior organization.

emotionally at least, Napoleon left behind his revolutionary past.

Guiana was nicknamed ‘the dry guillotine’ because its climate was almost as lethal as a death sentence.

In a bid to foil future plots, he never let it be publicly known where he meant to go until five minutes before his departure.25

On February 9, 1801, the Peace of Lunéville, negotiated by Joseph and Talleyrand and an eventually exhausted Count Ludwig von Cobenzl, finally ended the nine-year war between Austria and France.

The assassination of Tsar Paul I on March 23 came as a blow to Napoleon, who is said to have cried out in rage at the news.

Alexander was crowned tsar later that year. Although he theoretically had absolute power, he knew that he had to work with the nobility if he were to escape his father’s fate.

Since Alexander ultimately did more than any other individual to bring about Napoleon’s downfall, his emergence on to the European scene with his father’s assassination was a seminal moment.

(Napoleon’s understanding of naval affairs was dismal. He never truly grasped that the British ability to fire broadsides far more often per minute made the sheer numbers of ships in any engagement largely irrelevant, and that blockading France at sea strengthened rather than weakened British fighting ability.)

On October 1, 1801

Russia – which retained interests in the Mediterranean and had an army in Switzerland as recently as 1800

French troops were on the Rhine, in Holland and in north-west Italy, and France had hegemony over Switzerland and influence over her ally Spain – none of which the treaty mentioned.

Indeed it is curious to observe the change of style in the Government papers. The ‘Corsican adventurer’, ‘the atheistical adventurer’, is now ‘the august hero’, ‘the restorer of public order’, etc, etc, in fact everything that is great and good. It reminds one of the transformation in a pantomime, where a devil is suddenly converted into an angel.

Thus within the space of a year, Napoleon had made peace with Austria, Naples, Turkey, Russia, Britain and the émigrés.

On October 14 the sixty-three-year-old Lord Cornwallis, the British general who had surrendered to Washington at Yorktown in 1781, was welcomed to Calais with a salute of cannon and a guard of honour and conducted first to Paris, where there were celebrations and public illuminations,* and then to Amiens to conduct the detailed negotiations of the treaty with Joseph and Talleyrand.45 (Amiens was chosen for its good omens; Henry VIII and François I had signed a peace treaty there in 1527.)

In the early 1790s the produce of this former slave colony of 8,000 plantations was greater than all of Europe’s other Caribbean and American colonies combined, providing 40 per cent of Europe’s consumption of sugar and 60 per cent of its coffee, and accounting for 40 per cent of all of France’s overseas trade.

The Jacobins who had abolished slavery and the slave trade in 1794 were either dead, in disgrace or in prison.

January 29, 1802

Leclerc had failed to take into account the horrific ravages that malaria and yellow fever would wreak on his army.

On May 20, 1802,

Twenty generals, 30,000 Frenchmen and possibly as many as 350,000 Saint-Dominguans (of both races) had died.

Toussaint l’Ouverture, ‘the Black Spartacus’, died of pneumonia on April 7, 1803 in a large cold cell that can be visited today in the Fort de Joux in the Jura mountains.

‘The Saint-Domingue business was a great piece of folly on my part,’ Napoleon later admitted. ‘It was the greatest error that in all my government I ever committed. I ought to have treated with the black leaders, as I would have done the authorities in a province.’

The defeat in Saint-Domingue ended for ever Napoleon’s dreams of a French empire in the West.

Reviving the old royal practice by which generals and senior dignitaries had to ask the head of state’s permission to marry, Napoleon attempted to marry his generals into Ancien Régime families.

January 8, 1802,

Though it was humiliating that the new Italian Republic should be founded in France, where Talleyrand could better keep an eye on the delegates, this was the first time that the word ‘Italy’ had appeared on the political map of Europe since the collapse of Rome in the fifth century AD.

On Thursday, March 25, 1802, after nearly six months of negotiations, the Anglo-French peace treaty, to which France’s allies Spain and Holland were also signatories, was finally signed in the hôtel de ville at Amiens.

Amiens was almost as important for what it left unsaid as for what it actually stipulated.

1795, there was no mention of the futures of Holland, Switzerland or Piedmont, or any recognition of the Italian, Ligurian or Helvetian republics.

Yet in a sense Joseph and Talleyrand had been too successful: because Britain gained so little, her commitment to the peace was correspondingly weak.

On the conclusion of the Peace of Amiens, around 5,000 Britons descended on Paris. Some were curious, some wanted to see the Louvre collections, some wanted to use that excuse to visit the fleshpots of the Palais-Royal (which did a roaring trade), some wanted to renew old friendships and almost all of them wanted to meet or at least catch a glimpse of the First Consul. Napoleon was delighted to oblige, and ordered his ministers to throw dinners for distinguished foreigners at least once every ten days.

He certainly went out of his way to show Anglophilia at this time, displaying busts on either side of a chimney-piece at the Tuileries of the Whig leader Charles James Fox and Admiral Nelson.18 The Francophile Whig politician Fox one might have expected, but to honour the man who sank his fleet at Aboukir Bay only four years earlier was truly extraordinary. (We can be certain that Nelson wasn’t displaying a bust of Napoleon on his mantelshelf.)

May 1802

Like Julius Caesar refusing the Roman diadem twice, he wanted it to look as if he were being dragged reluctantly to lifelong power.

Napoleon was duly declared First Consul for life on August 2, with the power to appoint his successor.