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Napoleon was years later to describe Duroc as ‘the only man who had possessed his intimacy and entire confidence’.84 Duroc would be one of the very few people outside Napoleon’s family to use ‘tu’ when addressing him.
Napoleon was capable of compartmentalizing his life, so that one set of concerns never spilled over into another – probably a necessary attribute for any great statesman, but one he possessed to an extraordinary degree.
Since the campaign had begun a year earlier, Napoleon had crossed the Apennines and the Alps, defeated a Sardinian army and no fewer than six Austrian armies, and killed, wounded or captured 120,000 Austrian soldiers. All this he had done before his twenty-eighth birthday.
It was in the early Italian campaigns that Napoleon’s military philosophy and habits first became visible. He believed above all in the maintenance of strong esprit de corps. Although this combination of spirit and pride is by its nature intangible, he knew an army that had it could achieve wonders.
‘Remember it takes ten campaigns to create esprit de corps,’ he was to tell Joseph in 1807, ‘which can be destroyed in an instant.’
He had formulated a number of ways to raise and maintain morale, some taken from his reading of ancient history, others specific to his own leadership style and developed on campaign. One was to foster a sol...
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Napoleon ‘heard, interrogated, and decided at once; if it was a refusal, the reasons were explained in a manner which softened the disappointment’.84 Such accessibility to the commander-in-chief is impossible to conceive in the British army of the Duke of Wellington or in the Austrian army of Archduke Charles, but in republican France it was an invaluable means of keeping in touch with the needs and concerns of his men.
during the Italian campaign, one called out a request for a new uniform, pointing to his ragged coat, Napoleon replied: ‘Oh no, that would never do. It will hinder your wounds from being seen.’
Napoleon genuinely enjoyed spending time with his soldiers; he squeezed their earlobes, joked with them and singled out old grognards (literally ‘grumblers’, but also translatable as ‘veterans’), reminiscing about past battles and peppering them with questions.
Napoleon taught ordinary people that they could make history, and convinced his followers they were taking part in an adventure, a pageant, an experiment, an epic whose splendour would draw the attention of posterity for centuries to come.
‘If he happened to meet with convoys of wounded,’ recalled an aide-de-camp, ‘he stopped them, informed himself of their condition, of their sufferings, of the actions in which they had been wounded, and never quitted them without consoling them by his words or making them partakers in his bounty.’
Napoleon flattered his troops with references to the ancient world – though only a tiny minority would have been conversant with the Classics – and when with a special flourish he compared them to eagles, or told them how much their families and neighbours would honour them, he captivated the minds of his men, often for life.
The avalanche of praise he generally lavished on his troops was in sharp contrast to the acerbic tone he adopted towards generals, ambassadors, councillors, ministers and indeed his own family in private correspondence. ‘Severe to the officers,’ was his stated mantra, ‘kindly to the men.’93
At the start of the 1796 campaign, Napoleon had not been allowed to sign the armistice with Piedmont without the permission of Saliceti, who (though sympathetic to Napoleon) was nominally a commissioner of the Directory. Since then he had signed four major peace agreements on his own authority – with Rome, Naples, Austria and now Venice.
Talleyrand betrayed Napoleon in due course, as he did everyone else, and Napoleon took it very personally. The likelihood that he would die peacefully in his bed was proof for Napoleon later in life ‘that there can be no God who metes out punishment’.
His negotiating technique often involved such histrionics, usually put on for show. Whatever was broken, Cobenzl remained calm, merely reporting back to Vienna: ‘He behaved like a fool.’37
Placing oneself in the limelight while seeming modestly to edge away from it is one of the most skilful of all political moves, and Napoleon had mastered it perfectly.
It was in the Directors’ interests for Napoleon to go to Egypt. He might conquer it for France or – just as welcome – return after a defeat with his reputation satisfyingly tarnished. As the pro-Bonapartist British peer Lord Holland put it, they sent him there ‘partly to get rid of him, partly to gratify him, and partly to dazzle and delight that portion of Parisian society who … had considerable influence on public opinion’.
After the Revolution, the idea of invading Egypt had appealed both to French radical idealists for its promise of extending liberty to a people oppressed by foreign tyrants, and to more calculating strategists such as Carnot and Talleyrand, who wanted to counter British influence in the eastern Mediterranean.
His ultimate ambition – or fantasy – may be gauged by his demand for English maps of Bengal and the Ganges from the war ministry, and his request to be accompanied by Citizen Piveron, the former envoy to Britain’s greatest enemy in India, Tipu Sahib, ‘the Tiger of Mysore’.
Napoleon also took 125 books of history, geography, philosophy and Greek mythology in a specially constructed library, including Captain Cook’s three-volume Voyages, Montesquieu’s The Spirit of the Laws, Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther and books by Livy, Thucydides, Plutarch, Tacitus and, of course, Julius Caesar.
‘Savants and intellectuals are like coquettes,’ Napoleon was later to tell Joseph; ‘one may see them and talk with them, but don’t make one your wife or your minister.’
Napoleon’s armada left Toulon for Alexandria in fine weather on Saturday, May 19, 1798 and was joined by fleets from Marseilles, Corsica, Genoa and Civitavecchia. It was the largest fleet ever to sail the Mediterranean.
There were 280 ships in all, including 13 ships-of-the-line of between 74 and 118 guns (the latter, Vice-Admiral François Brueys’ flagship L’Orient, was the biggest warship afloat).
To evade Nelson on three occasions was extraordinary; the fourth time they would not be so lucky.
He pronounced that novels were ‘for ladies’ maids’ and ordered the librarian, ‘Only give them history books. Men should read nothing else.’
notably in 1565 when in four months the Turks had fired some 130,000 cannonballs at the forts of the knights – and would do so again during thirty months of bombing during the Second World War.
His reading had served him well and in his proclamation he echoed the rhythm and style of the Koran.
‘Well, general, are you going to take us to India like this?’ shouted a soldier at Napoleon, only to receive the reply: ‘No, I wouldn’t undertake that with soldiers such as you!’26
Murad Bey, a tall, scarred Circassian who had co-ruled Egypt for years with Ibrahim Bey, attacked with around 4,000 men. Napoleon formed battalion squares, with cavalry and baggage inside, which the Mamluks merely circled on horseback.
‘against a disciplined army it was only ridiculous’.31 Armed with javelins, axes (which they sometimes threw), scimitars, bows and arrows and antiquated firearms, the Mamluks were no match for trained volleys of musketry.
‘Fighting is a soldier’s religion; I never changed that. The other is the affair of women and priests. As for me, I always adopt the religion of the country I am in.’51
‘The moment that separates us from the object we love is terrible; it isolates us from the earth; the body feels convulsions of agony. The faculties of the soul are changed; it only communicates with the universe through a nightmare that distorts everything.’
‘It seems you like this country,’ Napoleon told his staff at breakfast on August 15, the morning after he heard the news, ‘that’s very lucky, for now we have no fleet to carry us back to Europe.’
a feast of one hundred clerics at which the French were allowed to drink wine, Napoleon was declared a son-in-law of the Prophet with the name ‘Ali-Bonaparte’. The Egyptians were humouring him and he them; as one French officer recalled: ‘The soldiers were politic in their expressions; when they returned to their quarters they laughed at the comedy.’76
The French made full use of their printing press, medical instruments, telescopes, clocks, electricity, balloons and other modern wonders to try to awe them, which al-Jabartī readily admitted did ‘baffle the mind’, but none of it appears to have advanced their cause politically. (When Berthollet demonstrated a chemical experiment at the Institut, a sheikh asked whether it could enable him to be in Morocco and Egypt at the same time. Berthollet replied with a Gallic shrug, which led the sheikh to conclude: ‘Ah well, he isn’t such a sorcerer after all.’
Napoleon sent Lieutenant Fourès off with allegedly important despatches for Paris, generally a three-month round-trip, only for his ship to be intercepted by the frigate HMS Lion the very next day. Instead of being interned by the British, Fourès was sent back to Alexandria, as was sometimes the custom with military minnows. He therefore reappeared in Cairo ten weeks before he was expected, to find his wife installed in the grounds of Napoleon’s Elfey Bey palace and nicknamed ‘Cleopatra’.91
On January 25, 1799 he did write to Britain’s foremost enemy in India, Tipu Sahib, announcing his imminent ‘arrival on the shores of the Red Sea with a numerous and invincible army, animated with the desire of delivering you from the iron yoke of England’.3 A British cruiser intercepted the letter, and Tipu was killed in the capture of his capital, Seringapatam, by the young and highly impressive British Lieutenant-General Sir Arthur Wellesley that May. Napoleon’s intention was probably simply to spread disinformation, as he knew his letters were falling into enemy hands.
Napoleon believed la peste to be susceptible to willpower, telling someone years later that ‘Those who kept up their spirits, and did not give way to the idea that they must die … generally recovered; but those who desponded almost invariably fell a sacrifice to the disorder.’
In fact there were probably closer to five thousand. It was a stark confession of complete indifference to the fate of non-white, non-Christian enemies.
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.
At night illuminations were hastily got up in every quarter, and in all the theatres the return was announced by shouts of ‘Vive la République! Vive Bonaparte!’ It was not the return of a general; it was the return of a leader in the garb of a general … Only the ghost of a government remained in France. Breached by all parties, the Directory was at the mercy of the first assault.
The grenadiers seem to have viewed their vital role in overthrowing the constitution with perfect equanimity. They put the orders of the officers under whom many of them had served on campaign – and whom all had heard of in the barrack-room as heroes back from Egypt – before those of their elected representatives.
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.
In November 1799, some 40 per cent of France was under martial law, but within three years it was safe to travel around France again, and trade could be resumed. Not even his Italian victories brought Napoleon more popularity.
‘If you make war, employ severity and activity; it is the only means by which you make it shorter, and consequently less deplorable for humanity.’
Napoleon collected twenty-two statues of his heroes for the grand gallery, starting, inevitably, with Alexander and Julius Caesar but also featuring Hannibal, Scipio, Cicero, Cato, Frederick the Great, George Washington, Mirabeau and the revolutionary general the Marquis de Dampierre.
Napoleon, Berthier and, after April 2, Carnot – who had been appointed minister of war when Napoleon despatched Berthier to the Army of the Reserve – together organized every facet of an operation that was to become one of the wonders of military history. ‘An army can pass always, and at all seasons,’ Napoleon told a sceptical General Dumas, ‘wherever two men can set their feet’.2
‘Why, look here, you fool,’ said Napoleon, pointing to the plains of the River Scrivia at San Giuliano Vecchio, explaining how he thought Melas would manoeuvre once the French had crossed the Alps.3 It was precisely there that the battle of Marengo was fought three months later.
By noon the French line was being pounded by forty guns and incessant musketry, and was running low on ammunition. ‘Bonaparte advanced in front,’ recalled Petit, ‘and exhorted to courage and firmness all the corps he met with; it was visible that his presence reanimated them.’
