Napoleon: A Life

by Andrew Roberts

Meanwhile, Napoleon sent Murat off to capture Safed and Junot to take Nazareth to foil any relief attempts from Damascus.

The battle of Mount Tabor is a misnomer, since it was actually fought on nearby Mount Hamoreh, although Kléber had marched around Tabor, which was 8 miles away.

Although they fled before really significant losses could be inflicted, the Ottoman army was completely scattered and their hopes of reconquering Egypt wrecked.

After the battle, Napoleon slept at the convent in nearby Nazareth, where he was shown the supposed bedchamber of the Virgin Mary.

On May 10,

It was to be the last assault; the next day Napoleon decided to raise the siege and return to Egypt.

It was however true that he needed to re-cross the desert before the heat made it impassable.

Napoleon had suffered the first significant reverse of his career (since Bassano and Caldiero could hardly count as such), and he had to abandon any dream of becoming another Alexander in Asia.

‘I missed my destiny at Acre.’

He had to leave fifteen badly wounded men behind in the hospital at Mount Carmel in the care of the monks; all of them were massacred when the Turks arrived, and the monks were driven from the monastery they had occupied for centuries.

Napoleon gathered together every available man from Cairo to march to Alexandria, which he reached on the night of July 23.

With the second Turkish invasion force destroyed and Egypt safe, Napoleon decided to return as soon as possible to a vulnerable France facing a new Coalition led by Britain, Russia and Austria.

Far from showing cowardice, it took a good deal of courage for Napoleon to cross the Mediterranean when it was virtually a British lake.

Roustam became Napoleon’s bodyguard, sleeping on a mattress outside his door every night for the next fifteen years, armed with a dagger.

Oliver Cromwell, the conservative revolutionary general who effected a coup d’état against a government he despised, was about to become more of a role-model for Napoleon than Denon could have guessed.

Denon recorded that Corsica was ‘the first sight of a friendly shore’. Coming into Ajaccio on September 30 ‘the batteries saluted on both sides; the whole population rushed to the boats and surrounded our frigates’.

One can still see the room he occupied on that occasion in the Casa Bonaparte; it was the last time he set foot in his childhood home.

The Egyptian adventure was over for Napoleon after nearly a year and five months, though not for the French army he had left behind. They would remain until Menou was forced to capitulate to the British two years later.

The greatest long-term achievements of Napoleon’s Egyptian campaign were not military or strategic, but intellectual, cultural and artistic.

Vivant Denon’s vast and magisterial Description de l’Égypte

Off-duty soldiers were occasionally shown lounging around in the foreground of prints, but for scale rather than propaganda.

Although not politically triumphalist, the multiple volumes of the Description de l’Égypte represent an apogee of French, indeed Napoleonic, civilization, and had a profound effect on the artistic, architectural, aesthetic and design sensibilities of Europe.

The savants’ greatest discovery was the Rosetta Stone, a stele in three languages found at El-Rashid in the Delta.

Tragically, the Institut near Tahrir Square in Cairo was burned down during the Arab Spring uprising on December 17, 2011, and almost all its 192,000 books, journals and other manuscripts – including the only handwritten manuscript of Denon’s Description de l’Égypte – were destroyed.

‘The men who have changed the world never succeeded by winning over the powerful, but always by stirring the masses. The first method is a resort to intrigue and only brings limited results. The latter is the course of genius and changes the face of the world.’

October 16, 1799.

A divorce might damage him politically, especially with devout Catholics, and Josephine was helpful to him politically with her royalist and social connections, as well as in smoothing over the sensibilities of those rebuffed by his brusqueness.

they slipped into comfortable domestic happiness, until dynastic considerations emerged a full decade later.

The story of Napoleon and Josephine is thus certainly not the romantic Romeo-and-Juliet love story of legend, but something subtler, more interesting and, in its way, no less admirable.

Louis Gohier,

Another crucial figure in the coup was Lucien Bonaparte, who had been elected to the Five Hundred in June 1798 aged twenty-three and was shortly to become its president, allowing the plotters their opportunity to clothe their coup with a spurious constitutionalism.

‘Brumaire’ means ‘season of mists and fog’, and it is appropriately hard to piece together the mechanics of what took place next because Napoleon deliberately committed nothing to paper;

For a man who wrote an average of fifteen letters a day, this time everything was to be done by word of mouth.

In his public appearances he went back to wearing his uniform of the Institut de France rather than that of a general.

The coup wasn’t Napoleon’s brainchild, but that of the Abbé Sieyès, who had replaced Reubell as a Director in May 1799 but who soon concluded that the government of which he was a leading member was simply too incompetent and corrupt to deal with the issues facing France.

It was Talleyrand who finally persuaded a reluctant Sieyès to choose Napoleon on the basis of his irreproachable republican record, and the lack of alternatives.

To Napoleon he is credited with saying, ‘You want the power and Sieyès wants the constitution, therefore join forces.’

A Royal Navy blockade had wrecked overseas trade and the paper currency was next to worthless.

Few blights undermine a society more comprehensively than hyperinflation, and great political prizes would go to anyone who could defeat it.

(The deputies of the legislature paid themselves in an inflation-proof way, by index-linking their salaries to the value of 30,000 kg of wheat.)

the constitutions that Napoleon had recently imposed on the Cisalpine, Venetian, Ligurian, Lemanic, Helvetian and Roman republics, along with his administrative reforms of Malta and Egypt, made him look like a zealous, efficient republican who believed in strong executives and central control, solutions that might also work well for metropolitan France.

the minimum age for Directors was still forty, whereas Napoleon was thirty,

‘When the house is crumbling, is it the time to busy oneself in the garden?’ Napoleon asked Marmont rhetorically. ‘A change here is indispensable.’22

His precise actions are impossible to know because of the total dearth of contemporary written evidence, but once it was launched everyone seems to have known where to be and what to do.

November 1

November 6

(Napoleon wasn’t a bigot; besides his closeness to Cambacérès he made the openly homosexual Joseph Fiévée prefect of the Nièvre department, where he and his lifelong partner deeply shocked the locals.)

So great was Napoleon’s trust in Cambacérès that he allowed him to run France during his absences on campaigns, a confidence returned by Cambacérès’ daily reports to him on every conceivable subject.

November 7 (16 Brumaire), 1799,

November 9 (18 Brumaire), 1799,