Napoleon the Great

by Andrew Roberts

‘The fate of a battle is the result of a single instant – a thought,’ Napoleon was later to say about Marengo. ‘The decisive moment comes, a moral spark is lit, and the smallest reserve accomplishes victory.’41 Austrian troops who had fought bravely all day simply cracked under the shock and strain of seeing victory snatched from them, and fled back to Alessandria in disorder.

Austrians had been expelled for the second time, northern Italy was swiftly pacified with a minimum of repression, and was to remain quiescent for the next fourteen years. Marengo confirmed Napoleon in his position as First Consul, and added to the myth of his invincibility.

For all his military genius, intellectual capacity, administrative ability and plain hard work, one should not underestimate the part that sheer good luck played in Napoleon’s career.

Anti-clericalism had been a driving force during the French Revolution, which had stripped the Catholic Church of its wealth, expelled and in many cases murdered its priests, and desecrated its altars. Yet Napoleon sensed that many among his natural supporters – conservative, rural, hard-working skilled labourers, artisans and smallholders – had not abjured the faith of their fathers and yearned for a settlement between the Roman Catholic Church and the Consulate they were growing to admire.

As we have seen, Napoleon himself was at best sceptical about Christianity.7 ‘Did Jesus ever exist,’ he asked his secretary on St Helena, Gaspard Gourgaud, ‘or did he not? I think that no contemporary historian has ever mentioned him.’8 (He was clearly unfamiliar with Josephus’ Antiquities of the Jews which does indeed mention Jesus.)

‘I do not see the mystery of the Incarnation, but the mystery of the social order. It associates with Heaven an idea of equality that keeps rich men from being massacred by the poor … Society is impossible without inequality; inequality intolerable without a code of morality, and a code of morality unacceptable without religion.’

‘The idea of God is very useful,’ Napoleon said, ‘to maintain good order, to keep men in the path of virtue and to keep them from crime.’19 ‘To robbers and galley slaves, physical restrictions are imposed,’ he said to Dr Barry O’Meara on St Helena, ‘to enlightened people, moral ones.’

With the end of the schism, no fewer than 10,000 Constitutional priests returned to the bosom of the Roman Church and one of the deepest wounds of the Revolution was healed.

Napoleon instinctively understood that if France was to function efficiently in the modern world, she needed a standardized system of law and justice, uniform weights and measures, a fully functioning internal market and a centralized education system, one that would allow talented adolescents from all backgrounds to enter careers according to merit rather than birth.

The Code Napoléon simplified the 14,000 decrees and laws that had been passed by the various revolutionary governments since 1789, and the 42 different regional codes that were in force, into a single unified body of law applicable to all citizens, laying down general principles and offering wide parameters for judges to work within.

In all this, the Code reflects Napoleon’s profound sexism: ‘Women should not be looked upon as equals of men,’ he said. ‘They are, in fact, only machines for making babies.’

‘Being educated together, which is so good for men, especially for teaching them to help each other and preparing them by comradeship for the battle of life, is a school of corruption for women. Men are made for the full glare of life. Women are made for the seclusion of family life and to live at home.’

As with the Code Napoléon, the lack of girls’ formal education needs to be seen here too in the context of his time; at the beginning of the nineteenth century there were very few girls’ schools in England or America, and none run by the state.

Since Alexander ultimately did more than any other individual to bring about Napoleon’s downfall, his emergence on to the European scene with his father’s assassination was a seminal moment.

(Napoleon’s understanding of naval affairs was dismal. He never truly grasped that the British ability to fire broadsides far more often per minute made the sheer numbers of ships in any engagement largely irrelevant, and that blockading France at sea strengthened rather than weakened British fighting ability.)

The charismatic and ruthless Toussaint l’Ouverture, a black freeman who had himself owned slaves, had imposed a constitution on Saint-Domingue in May 1801 that made him dictator for life, ostensibly in the name of the French revolutionary principles of liberty and equality.

He had also created an army of 20,000 former slaves and taken over the whole island, expelling the Spanish from the eastern half (the present-day Dominican Republic).57 He was not about to fall for Leclerc’s fine words, and fighting broke out before Leclerc could implement the first stage of Napoleon’s plan.

Although there is no evidence to support the modern accusation that, as one historian recently put it, ‘Bonaparte hated black people’, he undoubtedly shared the widespread Western assumption of the day that whites were superior to all non-whites, and he expected Leclerc to prevail easily with such a large, well-armed force against native fighters, just as he had at the battles of the Pyramids and Aboukir.

Everything passes rapidly on earth, with the exception of the mark we leave on history.’

Toussaint l’Ouverture, ‘the Black Spartacus’, died of pneumonia on April 7, 1803 in a large cold cell that can be visited today in the Fort de Joux in the Jura mountains.

Treaty of Lunéville.

For some British Radicals and Whigs, admiration for Napoleon hardly abated even up to Waterloo. The future prime minister Lord Melbourne wrote odes to Napoleon at university, Keats had a snuffbox with his portrait on it, Byron ordered an exact replica of his coach in which to travel the continent, and William Cobbett’s Weekly Political Register and Daniel Lovell’s Statesman praised him in extravagant terms.

He was carefully building up a cadre of political supporters who owed their positions to him.

The new constitution therefore had the appearance of political involvement, but genuine power rested completely with Napoleon.

‘England is not asleep,’ he wrote to Charles IV of Spain on the 11th, ‘she is always on the watch, and will not rest until she has seized all the colonies and all the commerce of the world. France can alone prevent this.’

President Thomas Jefferson signed the Louisiana Purchase, doubling the size of the United States at the stroke of his pen. The Americans paid France 80 million francs for 875,000 square miles of territory that today comprises all or some of thirteen states from the Gulf of Mexico across the Midwest right up to the Canadian border, at a cost of less than four cents an acre.

have just given to England a maritime rival that sooner or later will humble her pride.’95 Within a decade, the United States was at war with Britain rather than with France, and the War of 1812 was to draw off British forces that were still fighting in February 1815, and which might otherwise have been present at Waterloo.

‘unless it is its wickedness. The human heart is an abyss that is impossible to predict; the most piercing looks cannot gauge it.’

On the morning of April 6, Charles Pichegru was found dead in his cell. According to the Moniteur, he was reading Seneca’s account of the suicide of Cato, and the page was left open at the quotation: ‘He who conspires should not fear death.’

As well as founding the marshalate, on May 18, 1804 Napoleon formally constituted the Imperial Guard, an amalgamation of the Consular Guard and the unit that guarded the Legislative Body. It consisted of staff, infantry, cavalry and artillery components, with battalions of sappers and marines attached.

the Imperial Guard was conscious of its superiority to regular Line regiments, and was often used by Napoleon as a strategic reserve, only to be flung into battle at the critical moment, if at all. Their morale was generally considered the highest in the army, though they incurred resentment from the rest of the Grande Armée, which correctly believed that Napoleon treated them with favouritism, scoffing that their nickname, ‘the Immortals’, derived from the way that the Emperor protected them.

Napoleon’s view was that an ambassador was supposed to be ‘a minister of reconciliation, his duty is always a sacred one, based on morality’, but the British government had used Rumbold as ‘an instrument of war, who has the right to do anything’. He ordered Talleyrand to ask of the British: ‘Does it take the sovereigns of Europe to be no more than a lot of Indian nabobs?’

‘There is a moment in combat when the slightest manoeuvre is decisive and gives superiority; it is the drop of water that starts the overflow.’ Napoleon on Caesar at the battle of Munda

Napoleon ordered him to pay great attention to the soldiers, and see about them in detail. The first time you arrive at the camp, line up the battalions, and spend eight hours at a stretch seeing the soldiers one by one; receive their complaints, inspect their weapons, and make sure they lack nothing. There are many advantages to making these reviews of seven to eight hours; the soldier becomes accustomed to being armed and on duty, it proves to him that the leader is paying attention to and taking complete care of him; which is a great confidence-inspiring motivation for the soldier.5

‘Descendant of the great Ottomans, emperor of one of the greatest kingdoms in the world,’ he asked, ‘have you ceased to reign? How comes it that you permit the Russians to dictate to you?’

True friendship at the apex of power is notoriously difficult to maintain, and as time went on and death in battle claimed his four closest friends, there were fewer and fewer people who were close enough to Napoleon to tell him what he did not want to hear.

‘Genius and power were expressed on his large high forehead,’ wrote Bausset. ‘The fire which flashed from his eyes expressed all his thoughts and feelings. But when the serenity of his temper was not disturbed, the most pleasing smile lit up his noble countenance, and gave way to an indefinable charm, which I never beheld in any other person. At these times it was impossible to see him without loving him.’

He reported that Napoleon’s ‘deportment and manners were always the same; they were inherent and unstudied. He was the only man in the world of whom it may be said without adulation, that the nearer you viewed him the greater he appeared.’

‘Know how to listen, and be sure that silence often produces the same effect as does knowledge’,

‘It is necessary for us to be masters of the sea for six hours only,’ Napoleon wrote to Decrès on June 9, ‘and England will have ceased to exist. There is not a fisherman, not a miserable journalist, not a woman at her toilette, who does not know that it is impossible to prevent a light squadron appearing before Boulogne.’

His British interlocutor pointed out that Calder was to the leeward, and therefore couldn’t attack, which Napoleon dismissed as ‘only an excuse, advanced from national pride, for the Admiral ran away during the night of the 23rd’.27 In failing to appreciate the difference between leeward and windward, Napoleon once again demonstrated his huge nautical lacuna.

Napoleon continued to urge Villeneuve – whom he described to Decrès as ‘a poor creature, who sees double, and who has more perception than courage’ – to sail north, writing: ‘If you can appear here for three days, or even twenty-four hours, you’ll have achieved your mission … In order to help the invasion of that power which has oppressed France for six centuries, we could all die without regretting life.’35

‘Horse-racing shall be established in those departments of the Empire the most remarkable for the horses they breed: prizes shall be awarded for the fleetest horses.’46 Of course there was a military application to this but it is illustrative of the cornucopia of his thinking even, or perhaps particularly, in a crisis.

The corps system allowed Napoleon to turn his entire army 90 degrees to the right once over the Rhine. The manoeuvre was described by Ségur as ‘the greatest change of front ever known’ and meant that by October 6 the Grande Armée was in a line facing south, all the way from Ulm up to Ingolstadt on the Danube.56 This agile placing of a very large army across Mack’s line of retreat before he even knew what was happening, at the loss of no troops, stands as one of Napoleon’s most impressive military achievements.

‘Colonel Maupetit, at the head of the 9th Dragoons, charged into the village of Wertingen,’ he wrote in a report of a fight in which Murat and Lannes defeated an Austrian force on October 8; ‘being mortally wounded, his last words were: “Let the Emperor be informed that the 9th Dragoons have showed themselves worthy of their reputation, and that they charged and conquered, exclaiming ‘Vive l’Empereur!’

When an Austrian officer, remarking on Napoleon’s mud-spattered uniform, said how fatiguing the campaign in such wet weather must have been, Napoleon said: ‘Your master wanted to remind me that I am a soldier. I hope he will own that the imperial purple has not caused me to forget my first trade.’

Off Cape Trafalgar, 50 miles west of Cadiz, Villeneuve’s Franco-Spanish fleet of thirty-three ships-of-the-line were destroyed by Admiral Nelson’s twenty-seven ships-of-the-line, with a total of twenty-two French and Spanish ships lost to not one British.* Displaying what later became known as ‘the Nelson touch’ of inspired leadership, the British admiral split his fleet into two squadrons that attacked at a ninety degree angle to the Combined Fleet’s line and thereby cut the enemy into three groups of ships, before destroying two of them piecemeal. With the Grande Armée on the Danube it was entirely unnecessary for Villeneuve to have given battle – even if he had won, Britain couldn’t now have been invaded until the following year at the earliest – yet Napoleon’s persistent orders to engage had led directly to the disaster.†

The battle led to British naval dominance for over a century. As the philosopher Bertrand de Jouvenel put it, ‘Napoleon was master in Europe, but he was also a prisoner there.’

Instead of now abandoning his invasion dreams entirely, Napoleon continued to spend huge amounts of money, time and energy trying to rebuild a fleet that he believed could threaten Britain again through sheer numbers. He never understood that a fleet which spent seven-eighths of its time in port simply could not gain the seamanship necessary to take on the Royal Navy at the height of its operational capacity.

While a conscript in the Grand Armée could be – indeed very often was – trained in drill and musketry while on the march to the front, sailors couldn’t be taught on land how to deal with top-hamper lost in a gale, or to fire off more than one broadside in a rolling sea against an opponent who had been trained to fire two or even three in the same length of time.