Napoleon the Great

by Andrew Roberts

Napoleon’s mastery of land warfare was perfectly balanced by British mastery at sea, as the events of the aut...

sentry from the 17th Légère had overheard the prince’s demands. ‘Do you know, these people think they are going to swallow us up!’ Napoleon told him, to which the sentry replied, ‘Let them just try it; we should soon choke them!’102 That put Napoleon in a better mood. These brief but obviously heartfelt interactions with private soldiers, inconceivable for most Allied generals, were an integral part of Napoleon’s impact on his men. That night, after

The many torches held aloft by the troops were mistaken by the Austrians for the burning of the French camp before a retreat, in a classic example of cognitive dissonance, whereby pieces of evidence are forced into a predetermined set of assumptions.

A masterful plan, an appreciation of terrain, superb timing, a steady nerve, the discipline and training instilled at Boulogne, the corps system, exploitation of a momentary numerical advantage at the decisive point, tremendous esprit de corps, fine performances on the day by Friant, Davout, Vandamme, Soult and Saint-Hilaire, and a divided and occasionally incompetent enemy – Büxhowden was drunk during the battle – had given Napoleon the greatest victory of his career.*

‘A strange sight for the philosopher to reflect on!’ recalled one of those present. ‘An Emperor of Germany come to humble himself by suing for peace to the son of a small Corsican family, not long ago a sub-lieutenant of artillery, whose talents, good fortune and the courage of the French soldier had raised to the summit of power and made the arbiter of the destinies of Europe.’

Napoleon threw it ‘with violence to the end of the chamber’, saying: ‘Vile flatterer! How dare you say the French eagle stifles the English lion? I cannot launch upon the sea a single petty

fishing boat but she’s captured by the English. In reality it’s the lion that stifles the French eagle. Cast the medal into the foundry, and never bring me another!’

‘Had Sicily been closer and had I been with the vanguard,’ Napoleon told Joseph that month, ‘I would do it; my experience of war would mean that with 9,000 men I would defeat 30,000 English troops.’21 Here was another indication of his disastrous underestimation of the British, whom he was not personally to face across a battlefield until Waterloo.

There were plenty of local pro-French reformers whom he could have installed in power – Melzi in Italy, Rutger Jan Schimmelpenninck in Holland, Karl Dalberg in Germany, Prince Poniatowski in Poland, for example, even Crown Prince Ferdinand in Spain – who would have done a far better job than most Frenchmen, let alone squabbling, vain, disloyal and often incompetent members of the Bonaparte family.

‘We ought not to deprive the poor merely because they are poor of that which consoles their poverty,’ Napoleon said. ‘Religion is a kind of vaccination, which, by satisfying our natural love for the marvellous, keeps us out of the hands of charlatans and conjurors. The priests are better than the Cagliostros, the Kants, and all the visionaries of Germany.’

Although Napoleon worked phenomenally hard, he believed ‘Work should be a way to relax.’59 He thought that if one got up early enough, as he told Eugène on April 14, ‘One can get a lot of work done in little time.

This was the first sign of hostility towards a people to whom Napoleon had hitherto shown amity and respect; henceforth he seems to have been uncharacteristically unsure of himself when it came to policy towards the Jews. Although he didn’t meet many Jews during his childhood or at school, and none of his friends were Jewish, during the Italian campaign he had opened up the ghettos of Venice, Verona, Padua, Livorno, Ancona and Rome, and ended the practice of forcing Jews to wear the Star of David.

He had stopped Jews being sold as slaves in Malta and allowed them to build a synagogue there, as well as sanctioning their religious and social structures in his Holy Land campaign. He had even written a proclamation for a Jewish homeland in Palestine on April 20, 1799, which was rendered redundant after his defeat at Acre (but was nonetheless published in the Moniteur).

‘I thought that this would bring to France many riches because the Jews are numerous and they could come in large numbers to our country where they would enjoy more privileges than any other nation.’

Repulsive though such remarks are to all civilized people today, these were pretty standard views for an upper-middle-class French army officer in the early nineteenth century. It seems that, although Napoleon was personally prejudiced against Jews to much the same degree as the rest of his class and background, he saw advantages for France in making them less unwelcome there than they were elsewhere in Europe. Napoleon therefore hardly deserves his present reputation in Jewry as a righteous Gentile.

The foundation of the Rhine Confederation had profound implications for Europe. The most immediate was that its members’ simultaneous withdrawal from the Holy Roman Empire meant that the Empire, established by Charlemagne’s coronation in AD 800, was formally abolished by Francis on August 6, 1806.

There is no more powerful example of history’s law of unintended consequences than that Napoleon should have contributed to the creation of the country that was, half a century after his death, to destroy the French Empire of his own nephew, Napoleon III.

Your Majesty will be defeated, you will compromise your repose and the existence of your subjects without the shadow of a pretext. Prussia is today intact, and can treat with me in a manner suitable to her dignity; in a month’s time she will be in a very different position. You are still in a position to save your subjects from the ravages and misfortunes of war. It has barely started, you could stop it, and Europe would be grateful to you.96

This letter has been denounced as ‘a breath-taking blend of arrogance, aggression, sarcasm and false solicitude’.97 It can also be read as giving Frederick William one (very) last opportunity for a dignified exit, and extremely accurately estimating Prussia’s chances in the coming war (indeed the prediction of disaster ‘within a month’ was an underestimate, since the battles of Jena and Auerstädt took place within two weeks).

Truly it is a remarkable sensation to see such an individual on horseback, raising his arm over the world and ruling it.’102 In his Phenomenology Hegel posited the existence of the ‘beautiful soul’, a force that acts autonomously in disregard of convention and others’ interests, which, it has been pointed out, was ‘not a bad characterisation’ of Napoleon himself.

Napoleon harangued Lannes’ corps in person at 6 a.m., before sending them off towards Tauentzien. The military historian Colonel Baron Henri de Jomini, whose 1804 book on strategy had caught Napoleon’s attention and whom he appointed as official historian on his staff, was impressed how he understood ‘that it is necessary never to inspire too much contempt for the enemy, because where you should find an obstinate resistance, the morale of the soldier might be shaken by it’. So when he addressed Lannes’ men he praised the Prussian cavalry, but promised that ‘it could do nothing against the bayonets of his Egyptians!’, by which he meant Lannes’ veterans who had fought in the battle of the Pyramids.106

Murat, riding-whip in hand, followed by dragoons, cuirassiers and the light cavalry of all three corps, engaged in a relentless pursuit over 6 miles, slaughtering many and capturing several thousand Saxons on the way. He stopped only when he reached Weimar at 6 p.m. The deep pursuit of the Prussian forces after Jena was a textbook operation – literally so, as it is still taught in military academies today – of how to maximize victories.

For Davout, 13 miles away at Auerstädt, that same day defeated Frederick William and Brunswick, the former escaping only after many hours in the saddle, and the latter dying of his wounds shortly after the battle. With 30,000 men and 46 guns, Davout had performed a double envelopment on the 52,000 Prussians with their 163 guns, losing 7,000 French soldiers killed and wounded in that bloody engagement, but inflicting almost twice as many casualties on the Prussians.

It was one of the most remarkable victories of the Napoleonic Wars, and, as at Austerlitz, Davout had radically altered the odds in Napoleon’s favour.

‘The first qualification of a soldier is fortitude under fatigue and privation. Courage is only the second. Hardship, poverty and want are the best school for a soldier.’ Napoleon’s Military Maxim No.

The fall of Berlin came so quickly that shopkeepers didn’t have time to take down the numerous satirical caricatures of Napoleon from their windows.4 As in Venice, the Emperor had the city’s Quadriga and winged Victory chariot removed from the Brandenburg Gate and taken back to Paris, while prisoners from the Prussian Guard were marched past the same French embassy on whose steps they had so hubristically sharpened their swords the previous month.

‘Soldiers,’ Napoleon proclaimed from Potsdam on October 26, ‘the Russians boast of coming to us. We will march to meet them, and thus spare them half the journey. They shall find another Austerlitz in the heart of Prussia.’18 This was not what the army wished to hear. Now that the Prussian capital had fallen they wanted to return home.

‘I will conquer the sea through the power of the land.’29 Later he stated: ‘It’s the only means of striking a blow to England and obliging her to make peace.’30 It was true; since the destruction of the French fleet at Trafalgar there was no direct way to damage Britain other than commercially.

As early as December that of Bordeaux reported a dangerous downturn of business. International trade simply wasn’t the zero-sum game that, with his crude Colbertism, Napoleon assumed it to be. By March 1807 he had to authorize special industrial loans from the reserve funds to offset the crises that were resulting.

Along with the British practice of ‘impressing’ (i.e. kidnapping) thousands of Americans for service in the Royal Navy, the November 1807 Orders-in-Council were the primary cause of the War of 1812 between Britain and the United States.

Many of Napoleon’s soldiers in the coming battles of the Polish campaign wore uniforms made in Halifax and Leeds, and British ministers boasted in the House of Commons that Napoleon couldn’t even provide the insignia stitched onto his officers’ uniforms except by resort to British manufacturers.34

Although Napoleon was not so naive as to believe that smuggling could be stamped out altogether, he went to great lengths to suppress it, posting three hundred customs officers along the Elbe in 1806, for example. Yet the British made even greater efforts to facilitate smuggling, setting up a huge operation on the North Sea island of Heligoland.

With Britain’s politicians possessed by beliefs so resistant to reason, it is hard to see how Napoleon could ever have persuaded Britain to make peace after the death of Fox.

One of the army’s jokes was that the entire Polish language could be reduced to five words – ‘Chleba? Nie ma. Woda? Zaraz!’, ‘Bread? There is none. Water? Immediately!’ – so when an infantryman in a column near Nasielsk shouted out to Napoleon: ‘Papa, Chleba?’, he immediately called back ‘Nie ma’, whereupon the whole column roared with laughter.

‘He loved the soldiers who took the liberty of talking to him, and always laughed with them.’

He was by now vigorously pursuing his affair, using the ‘tu’ form to address Marie which he otherwise reserved solely for Josephine and the Shah of Persia:

For a commander for whom speed was always the essential element, Poland’s winters were exceptionally frustrating.

Napoleon sprung one of the great audacious moves of his military career. As the blizzard abated, he flung almost the whole of Murat’s Cavalry Reserve into the greatest cavalry charge of the Napoleonic Wars. Pointing

Murat, who was wearing a green Polish cape and green velvet bonnet for the occasion, and carried only a riding whip, then led 7,300 dragoons, 1,900 cuirassiers and 1,500 Imperial Guard cavalry into a headlong attack. ‘Heads up, by God!’ cried Colonel Louis Lepic of the Guard grenadiers-à-cheval. ‘Those are bullets, not turds!’ The Russian cavalry was hurled back against its own infantry; Russian gunners were sabred alongside their guns; Serpallen was recaptured, and Murat only stopped when he reached Anklappen.

‘When two armies have dealt each other enormous wounds all day long,’ Napoleon commented, ‘the field has been won by the side which, armoured in constancy, refuses to quit.’

Augereau’s attack in the snowstorm had been so disastrous that his corps had to be split up and distributed to other marshals as he convalesced, something for which he never truly forgave Napoleon.

Murat’s cavalry charge had been splendid and worthwhile, but a desperate remedy, as the presence of Napoleon’s own bodyguard in it eloquently attested. The

As the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars progressed, the casualty rates in battles increased exponentially: at Fleurus they were 6% of the total number of men engaged, at Austerlitz 15%, at Eylau 26%, at Borodino 31% and at Waterloo 45%. This was partly because with ever-larger armies being raised, battles tended to last longer – Eylau was Napoleon’s first two-day engagement since Arcole; Eggmühl, Aspern-Essling and Wagram in 1809, Dresden in 1813 were also two and Leipzig in 1813 went on for three – but mainly because of the huge increase in the numbers of cannon present.

Eylau had struck at his myth of invincibility, a blot that needed to be expunged if the Austrians were to remain neutral – especially when in late February Frederick William rejected much more lenient peace terms than Duroc had offered the Marquis di Lucchesini, the Prussian ambassador to Paris, after Jena.

‘Marengo day, victory day!’18 Napoleon was always highly attuned to the propaganda possibilities of anniversaries, as well as being superstitious.

An entire cavalry charge was destroyed with two volleys of canister. The Russian left was utterly destroyed, and trapped against the Alle river. Sénarmont’s action became famous in military textbooks as an ‘artillery charge’, although his gunners suffered 50 per cent casualties.

The peace treaties that the negotiations produced – signed with Russia on July 7 and Prussia two days later – effectively divided Europe into zones of French and Russian influence.

‘He kept me half an hour talking to me of my uniform and buttons,’ Napoleon reminisced, ‘so that at last I said: “You must ask my tailor.”

Napoleon – whose crown was at least confirmed by a plebiscite – argued for autocracy. ‘For who is fit to be elected?’ Napoleon asked. ‘A Caesar, an Alexander only comes along once a century, so that the election must be a matter of chance, and the succession is surely worth more than a throw of dice.’

He thus needed to play each off against the others, and as much as possible against Britain too. He used Prussia’s desire for Hanover, Russia’s inability to fight on after Friedland, a marriage alliance with Austria, the differences between Russia and Austria over the Ottoman Empire and the fear of Polish resurgence that all three powers felt to avoid having to fight the four powers simultaneously.