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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.
From the battle of Lodi on, Napoleon’s men gave him the nickname le petit caporal, in that ancient tradition of soldiers affectionately teasing commanders they admire: Julius Caesar’s men sang songs about ‘the bald adulterer’ (according to Suetonius), Wellington was called ‘Nosey’, Robert E. Lee ‘Granny’ and so on. ‘The little corporal’ was a soubriquet that Napoleon liked and encouraged, emphasizing as it did a republican ordinariness of which he was in fact divesting himself. After Lodi, all mutinous rumblings disappeared, and that vital sense of esprit de corps took its place and never left
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Ten years later Napoleon would write in a postscript of a letter to Junot: ‘Remember Binasco; it brought me tranquillity in all of Italy, and spared shedding the blood of thousands. Nothing is more salutary than appropriately severe examples.’78 ‘If you make war,’ he would say to General d’Hédouville in December 1799, ‘wage it with energy and severity; it is the only means of making it shorter and consequently less deplorable for mankind.’
Eighteen months earlier he had been an unknown, moody soldier writing essays on suicide; now he was famous across Europe, having defeated mighty Austria, wrung peace treaties from the Pope and the kings of Piedmont and Naples, abolished the medieval dukedom of Modena, and defeated in every conceivable set of military circumstances most of Austria’s most celebrated generals – Beaulieu, Wurmser, Provera, Quasdanovich, Alvinczi, Davidovich – and outwitted the Archduke Charles.
The greatest long-term achievements of Napoleon’s Egyptian campaign were not military or strategic, but intellectual, cultural and artistic.
public opinion in Paris was indifferent to whether Napoleon had used force to gain power or not. Army officers prize order, discipline and efficiency, each of which Napoleon considered by then to be more important than liberty, equality and fraternity, and at that moment the French people agreed with him.
So often, when it came to manipulating battle casualties, or inserting documents into archives, or inventing speeches to the Army of Italy, or changing ages on birth certificates, or painting Napoleon on a rearing horse crossing the Alps, Napoleon and his propagandists simply went one unnecessary step too far, and as a result invited ridicule and criticism of what were genuinely extraordinary achievements.
by helping the United States to continental greatness, and enriching the French treasury in the process, Napoleon was able to prophesy: ‘I have just given to England a maritime rival that sooner or later will humble her pride.’
The treaty which we have just signed has not been obtained by art or dictated by force; equally advantageous to the two contracting parties, it will change vast solitudes into flourishing districts. From this day the United States take their place among the powers of first rank.’
When General Nicolas Jean-de-Dieu Soult, who was in charge at Saint-Omer (77 letters) reported that it was impossible to embark the entire force in twenty-four hours, Napoleon expostulated, ‘Impossible, sir! I am not acquainted with the word; it is not in the French language, erase it from your dictionary.’
All too often his phrase ‘it is with such baubles that men are led’ has been quoted wildly out of context to imply that he was being cynical, whereas fuller quotation shows that he was in fact commending the ‘baubles’ as the physical manifestations of honour.
Napoleon’s crowning of himself was the ultimate triumph of the self-made man, and in one way a defining moment of the Enlightenment. It was also fundamentally honest: he had indeed got there through his own efforts. It is possible that he later regretted doing it, however, because of the vaulting egoism it suggested.
Although Madame Mère hadn’t attended the coronation, when she was congratulated on her son’s elevation to the imperial purple her reply was replete with her natural fatalism and great common sense. ‘Pourvu que ça dure,’ she said. ‘Let’s hope that it lasts.’
On the afternoon of October 13, as Napoleon rode through Jena, he was spotted by the philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel from his study window. Hegel, who was writing the last pages of The Phenomenology of Spirit, told a friend that he had seen ‘the Emperor, this Weltseele [world-soul] ride out of town … Truly it is a remarkable sensation to see such an individual on horseback, raising his arm over the world and ruling it.’
An hour before nightfall, Napoleon visited Eylau. ‘The streets were full of corpses,’ Captain François-Frédéric Billon recalled, ‘what a horrible spectacle. Tears welled in the Emperor’s eyes; nobody would have believed possible such an emotion from this great man of war, however I saw them myself, these tears … The Emperor was doing his best to prevent his horse stepping on human remains. Being unsuccessful
Lying deep within the French Revolution were the seeds of its own destruction because the concepts of liberty, equality and fraternity are mutually exclusive. A society can be formed around two of them, but never all three. Liberty and equality, if they are strictly observed, will obliterate fraternity; equality and fraternity must extinguish liberty; and fraternity and liberty can only come at the expense of equality. If extreme equality of outcome is the ultimate goal, as it was for the Jacobins, it will crush liberty and fraternity.
‘Between a battle lost and a battle won,’ Napoleon had said on the eve of the battle of Leipzig, ‘the distance is immense and there stand empires.’
Not committing the Guard at Borodino, staying too long in Moscow and Leipzig, splitting his forces in the Leipzig and Waterloo campaigns and, finally, coming to the decisive engagement on ground which his opponent had chosen: all were the result of Napoleon not following his own military maxims.
The mystery of the battle of Waterloo is why a collection of fine and experienced French combat generals of all three arms repeatedly failed to co-ordinate their efforts, as they had done successfully on so many previous battlefields.
The question of how to deal with their prisoner was a tricky one for the British. The Hundred Days following his return from Elba had cost almost 100,000 men killed or wounded on all sides, and no repetition could be risked.
Saturday, May 5, 1821, after a very blustery and stormy morning, the fifty-one-year-old former Emperor gave three sighs at long intervals and died at 5.49 p.m., just after the firing of the island’s sunset gun.174 What Chateaubriand called ‘the mightiest breath of life that ever animated human clay’ had ceased.
On St Helena, when asked why he had not taken Frederick the Great’s sword when he had visited Sanssouci, he replied, ‘Because I had my own.’
