Napoleon the Great

by Andrew Roberts

Ancient history provided him with an encyclopaedia of military and political tactics and quotations that he would draw on throughout his life. This inspiration was so profound that when posing for paintings he would sometimes put his hand into his waistcoat in imitation of the toga-wearing Romans.

Having mastered the requisite French at Autun, in April 1779, four months shy of his tenth birthday, Napoleon was admitted to the Royal Military School of Brienne-le-Château, near Troyes in the Champagne region. His father left the next day, and as there were no school holidays they were not to see each other again for three years.

Napoleon was taught to appreciate France’s greatest moments under Charlemagne and Louis XIV, but he also learned about her recent defeats in the Seven Years War at the battles of Quebec, Plassey, Minden and Quiberon Bay and ‘the prodigious conquests of the English in India’.

Guibert preached the importance of speed, surprise and mobility in warfare, and of abandoning large supply depots in walled cities in favour of living off the land. Another of Guibert’s principles was that high morale – esprit de corps – could overcome most problems.

an army officer, Napoleon believed in centralized control within a recognized hierarchical chain of command and the importance of maintaining high morale. Order in matters of administration and education was vital. He had a deep, instinctive distaste for anything which looked like a mutinous canaille (mob). None of these feelings was to change much during the French Revolution, or, indeed, for the rest of his life.

His father’s early death may also in part explain Napoleon’s own drive and boundless energy; he suspected, correctly, that his own lifespan would be short.

This letter is interesting not just for its laudable filial feeling, but for the fact that Napoleon still considered France ‘a foreign country’.

He was not originally looking for such an encounter, but the fact that he thought it worthy of chronicling suggests that this was probably the occasion on which he lost his virginity. The conversational method of quick-fire questions was pure Napoleon.

his voluminous notebooks from Auxonne are full of the history, geography, religion and customs of all the most prominent peoples of the ancient world, including the Athenians, Spartans, Persians, Egyptians and Carthaginians. They cover modern artillery improvements and regimental discipline, but also mention Plato’s Republic, Achilles and (inevitably) Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar.

‘I believe every officer ought to serve in the artillery,’ he was to say, ‘which is the arm that can produce most of the good generals.’

‘I was born when the country was perishing,’ he declared with a flourish. ‘Thirty thousand Frenchmen vomited onto our coasts, drowning the thrones of liberty in seas of blood, such was the odious spectacle which first met my eye. The cries of the dying, the groans of the oppressed, the tears of despair surrounded my cradle from my birth.’96 These were extraordinary sentiments from someone who had taken an oath to serve the King of France when he was commissioned as an officer.

The idea that the squabbling Corsicans were the true heirs of Marcus Porcius Cato, paladin of Roman liberty, was more an indication of Napoleon’s romantic obsession with the classical world than a useful historical insight.

Any hopes Napoleon might have had of becoming a successful author were once again stymied, this time by the man he had spent his youth idolizing.

‘By never entering a café or going into society; by eating dry bread, and brushing my own clothes so that they might last the longer. I lived like a bear, in a little room, with books for my only friends … These were the joys and debaucheries of my youth.’

He might have been exaggerating slightly, but not much. There was nothing he valued so much as books and a good education.

‘Reflections on the State of Nature’, argued that mankind had lived better before society existed, a concept lifted wholesale from Rousseau.

Austria and Prussia invaded France ten days later, inviting the well-justified supposition that Louis XVI and his Austrian wife sympathized with the invasion, and were collaborating with France’s enemies who now publicly stated their wish to restore them to full authority.

the Revolution was saved when Generals François Kellermann and Charles Dumouriez defeated Brunswick’s Prussian army at the battle of Valmy in the Champagne-Ardenne region, proving that the citizen army of France could defeat the regular armies of the counter-revolutionary Powers.

It was impossible for Napoleon to remain a Corsican patriot when the man who personified Corsican nationalism rejected him and his family so comprehensively.

He could see how provincial Corsica’s concerns were compared to the universal ideals thrown up by the Revolution,

Over the coming months, Napoleon began to think of himself more and more as French, and less and less as Corsican.

Pittites in London funded a series of military coalitions against France – numbering no fewer than seven in all – through massive direct government-to-government cash subsidies, what Napoleon would call ‘Pitt’s gold’.

The month after Louis XVI’s execution, Napoleon obtained his first significant command. He was put in charge of the artillery section of an expedition to ‘liberate’ three small Sardinian islands from the Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia under Paoli’s nephew, Pier di Cesari Rocca, whom he privately derided as a ‘clothes-horse’.

A furious Napoleon was forced to spike his own cannon and throw his mortars into the sea.

The first time Napoleon saw military action was therefore an humiliation, but had Paoli furnished the 10,000 men that the Paris Convention had requested for the expedition, rather than only 1,800, it might have succeeded.

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.

On June 11, 1793 the Bonapartes left Calvi on board the Prosélyte, landing at Toulon two days later and bringing to an end nearly two and three-quarter centuries of residency on the island.

Marmont came from a good family and Napoleon liked him very much, but he loved Junot, a former battalion quartermaster on the Côte d’Or, from the moment that a cannonball landed near them while he was dictating a letter, spraying dust and gravel over them both, and Junot coolly remarked that now he wouldn’t need any sand to blot it.56

‘I always found him at his post; when he needed rest he lay on the ground wrapped in his cloak: he never left the batteries.’

When all the gunners trying to establish a battery of cannon within a pistol shot of Fort Mulgrave were killed or wounded, Napoleon christened it ‘Hommes Sans Peur’ (Men Without Fear) and thereby continued to receive volunteers to man it. Nobody better understood the psychology of the ordinary soldier.

‘The whirlwind of flames and smoke from the arsenal resembled the eruption of a volcano,

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.

Between 1793 and 1797, the French would lose 125 warships to Britain’s 38, including 35 capital vessels (ships-of-the-line) to Britain’s 11, most of the latter the result of fire, accidents and storms rather than French attack.15 The maritime aspect of grand strategy was always one of Napoleon’s weaknesses: in all his long list of victories, none was at sea.

On St Helena he defined love as ‘the occupation of the idle man, the distraction of the warrior, the stumbling block of the sovereign’, and told one of his entourage: ‘Love does not really exist. It’s an artificial sentiment born of society.’

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

Napoleon prepared to use grapeshot, the colloquial term for canister or case shot, which consists of hundreds of musket balls packed into a metal case that rips open as soon as it leaves the cannon’s muzzle, sending the lead balls flying in a relatively wide arc at an even greater velocity than the 1,760 feet per second of a musket shot.

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.’

when a lady asked him how he could have fired so mercilessly on the mob he replied: ‘A soldier is only a machine to obey orders.’54 He did not point out that it was he who had given the orders.

she was later sexually self-indulgent, became involved in sleazy business deals and loved luxury – her dress bills became higher than Marie Antoinette’s – and married for stability and financial security rather than for love, it is hard to hold this against her after what she had been through.

An astonishing number of his letters throughout his career refer to providing footwear for his troops. Although he probably never said ‘An army marches on its stomach’, as legend has it, he was always deeply conscious that it indubitably marched on its feet.

Berthier used to communicate with his colleagues, conveying Napoleon’s wishes in polite but firm terms, invariably starting ‘The Emperor requests, general, that on receipt of this order you will …’16 Among Berthier’s many qualities was a diplomatic nature so finely attuned that he somehow managed to persuade his wife, the Duchess Maria of Bavaria, to share a chateau with his mistress Madame Visconti (and vice versa).

His special ability, amounting to something approaching genius, was to translate the sketchiest of general commands into precise written orders for every demi-brigade.

Several of his future battles were to follow the same parameters: an elderly opponent lacking energy; a nationally and linguistically diverse enemy confronting the homogeneous French army; a vulnerable spot which he would latch on to and not let go.

‘Living off the land’ allowed Napoleon a speed of manoeuvre that was to become an essential element of his strategy. ‘The strength of the army,’ he stated, ‘like power in mechanics, is the product of multiplying the mass by the velocity.’

‘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.

The systematic exaggeration of enemy losses and diminution of his own was to be a persistent feature throughout all Napoleon’s campaigns, and had of course been a feature of the writings of the classical authors with whom he was so familiar.

it must be acknowledged that Lieutenant Charles did have some courage to cuckold Napoleon Bonaparte in an era when duelling was common.

Where he abolished the Inquisition, obscure feudal practices, anti-Semitic regulations and restraints on trade and industry such as the guilds, Napoleon also brought genuine enlightenment to peoples who, without his armies’ victories, would have remained often without rights or equality before the law.

Napoleon believed that ‘bloodletting is among the ingredients of political medicine’, but he also thought that quick and certain punishments meant that large-scale repression could largely be avoided.

‘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.’