Napoleon: A Life

by Andrew Roberts

the decapitation of Louis XVI on January 21, 1793

On February 1 France declared war on Britain and Holland, shortly after Spain, Portugal and the Kingdom of Piedmont in Italy had declared war on France. Ignoring the verdict of Valmy, the European monarchies were coming together to punish the regicide Republic.

In March 1793

the declaration of war against Britain by the revolutionary regime was a profound mistake;

Britain saw an opportunity to use her maritime power to sweep French trade from the world’s oceans, neutralize or capture French colonies and cement her position as the world’s greatest commercial power after her humiliation in America only a decade earlier.

massive direct government-to-government cash subsidies,

It was an inauspicious start for the career of the new Caesar, but it taught him the importance of morale, logistics and leadership more powerfully than any number of academic lectures.

the British – who were to occupy Corsica with his blessing on July 23, 1794

The Reign of Terror had begun.

It was his farewell note to his homeland.

by the end of the month Paoli had recognized Britain’s King George III as king of Corsica.*

Napoleon never entirely severed relations with the land of his birth, although he would set foot there only once again, for a few days on his way back from Egypt in 1799.

as he stepped ashore in Provence on June 13, 1793 he knew it was in France that he would have to build his future.

his most important piece of writing to date, the political pamphlet Le Souper de Beaucaire.

It established him as a politically trustworthy soldier in the eyes of the Jacobins.

The result of all his hectoring, bluster, requisitioning and political string-pulling was that Napoleon put together a strong artillery train in very short order.

This took significant powers of leadership – and also the kind of implicit threat that could be made by a Jacobin army officer during Robespierre’s Terror.

At one o’clock on the morning of Tuesday, December 17, 1793,

The Allies evacuated Toulon the next morning, creating pandemonium,

Great and deserved benefits flowed to Napoleon from the victory at Toulon.

Rarely in military history has there been so high a turnover of generals as in France in the 1790s. It meant that capable young men could advance through the ranks at unprecedented speed.

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.

On February 7, 1794,

During the Piedmontese campaign Napoleon received official confirmation of his promotion to brigadier-general, which required him to answer the question ‘Noble or not noble?’ Very sensibly, given that the Terror was still raging, he answered, technically untruthfully, in the negative.

‘I’ve been somewhat moved by the fate of the younger Robespierre,’ he wrote to Tilly, ‘whom I liked and believed honest, but had he been my own brother, if he had aspired to tyranny I’d have stabbed him myself.’

In 1794, innocence was no defence against the guillotine, and nor was proven heroism fighting on behalf of the Republic, so Napoleon was in genuine danger.

On March 3, 1795

The maritime aspect of grand strategy was always one of Napoleon’s weaknesses: in all his long list of victories, none was at sea.

Napoleon saw no separation between the military and political spheres any more than his heroes Caesar or Alexander had done.

Napoleon was in fact determined to enjoy the charms of Paris.

May 1795,

Besides Toulon, he was to fight the British only twice more, at Acre and in the Waterloo campaign.

Madame Mère, as his mother came to be called,

The Topographical Bureau was a small, highly efficient organization within the war ministry that has been described as ‘the most sophisticated planning organisation of its day’.

This period between mid-August and early October 1795 – short, but intellectually intense – was when Napoleon learned the practicalities of strategic warfare, as distinct from the tactical battle-fighting at which he had excelled at Toulon.

Goethe’s celebrated novel of 1774, The Sorrows of Young Werther,

Alexis de Tocqueville would write that states are never more vulnerable than when they attempt to reform themselves, and that was certainly true of France in the autumn of 1795.

Sunday, October 4,

This was Napoleon’s first introduction to frontline, high-level national politics, and he found it intoxicating.

‘Good and upstanding people must be persuaded by gentle means,’ Napoleon would later write. ‘The rabble must be moved by terror.’

‘The whiff of grapeshot’ – as it became known – meant that the Paris mob played no further part in French politics for the next three decades.

Heavy rainfall on the night of 13 Vendémiaire quickly washed the blood from the streets, but its memory lingered. Even the violently anti-Jacobin Annual Register, founded by Edmund Burke, pointed out that ‘It was in this conflict that Buonaparte appeared first on the theatre of war, and by his courage and conduct laid the foundation of that confidence in his powers which conducted him so soon thereafter to preferment and to glory.’

Another task was to oversee the confiscation of all civilian weaponry, which according to family lore led to his meeting a woman of whom he had possibly heard on the social grapevine but hadn’t hitherto met: Vicomtesse Marie-Josèphe-Rose Tascher de la Pagerie, the widow de Beauharnais, whom Napoleon was to dub ‘Josephine’.

Josephine had blackened stubs for teeth, thought to be the result of chewing Martiniquais cane sugar as a child, but she learned to smile without showing them.

Josephine took the opportunity of the post-Vendémiaire arms confiscations to send her fourteen-year-old son Eugène de Beauharnais to Napoleon’s headquarters to ask whether his father’s sword could be retained by the family for sentimental reasons.

(She sensibly didn’t admit the extent of her debts until she had Napoleon’s ring on her finger.)

The Revolution had removed responsibility for registering births, deaths and marriages from the clergy, so Napoleon and Josephine married in a civil ceremony at 10 p.m. on Wednesday, March 9, 1796,

The bride wore a republican tricolour sash over her white muslin wedding dress,

The reason Napoleon had been so late for his own wedding, and why his honeymoon then lasted less than forty-eight hours, was that on March 2 Barras and the other four members of France’s new executive government, the Directory, had given him the best wedding present he could ever have hoped for: command of the Army of Italy.

But what struck me still more was the sight of a commander-in-chief perfectly indifferent about showing his subordinates how completely ignorant he was of various points of a business which the youngest of them was supposed to know perfectly, and this raised him a thousand cubits in my opinion.