Napoleon the Great

by Andrew Roberts

That he achieved this for a decade after the collapse of the Peace of Amiens, despite clearly being the European hegemon that each power most feared, was a tribute to his statesmanship. The effective dividing of Europe into French and Russian spheres of influence was the defining moment of this strategy.

Perhaps I was happiest at Tilsit. I had just surmounted many vicissitudes, many anxieties, at Eylau for instance; and I found myself victorious, dictating laws, having emperors and kings pay me court.’41 It was a wise moment to have chosen.

Jérôme didn’t have a good enough curriculum vitae for a crown, but Napoleon continued to feel that he could depend upon his family more than anyone else – despite the clear indications to the contrary from Lucien’s exile, Jérôme’s marriage, Joseph’s weakness in Naples, Pauline’s insubordinate infidelities and Louis’ blind eye to British smuggling in Holland.

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.

If extreme equality of outcome is the ultimate goal, as it was for the Jacobins, it will crush liberty and fraternity. With his creation of a new nobility Napoleon dispensed with that concept of equality, and instead enshrined in the French polity the concept of equality before the law in which he believed wholeheartedly.

Savary explained in his memoirs that Napoleon never minded people disagreeing with him, so long as they did it in a loyal spirit and in private: ‘He never resented anyone who frankly showed opposition to his opinion; he liked his opinions to be discussed.’

Napoleon once said that although a number of people, especially Josephine, had told him he ought to stay longer at table, he considered the amount of time he spent there to be ‘already a corruption of power’.

‘He used to get up,’ recalled another secretary, ‘after an hour’s sleep, as wide awake and as clear in the head as if he had slept quietly the whole night.’

Whereas Louis XVIII had a stamp made up for his signature, Napoleon always read letters through before signing them personally, not least because his speed of dictation meant that secretaries could sometimes take words down incorrectly.

Although he worked them inordinately hard, Napoleon was considerate to his staff, who almost universally admired him. He was indeed a hero to his valets, aides-de-camp and orderlies, and far more of his personal servants volunteered to go into exile with him than the British could allow, a remarkable tribute to his talent as an employer.

She let British ships into her ports to buy wine, her largest export, and had large colonies and a substantial fleet, but an army of only 20,000 men. The country was ruled by the lazy, obese and slow-witted but absolute Prince João, whose Spanish wife Carlota had attempted to overthrow him in 1805.51

On October 18 Junot had crossed the Bidasoa river into Spain en route to Portugal. He met no resistance even at Lisbon, and on November 29 the Portuguese royal family escaped to Rio de Janeiro in good time on Royal Navy warships, booed at the docks by the crowds for their desertion.

Spanish politics were so rotten, and the Spanish Bourbons so decadent and pathetic, that their throne seemed ripe for the taking.

Godoy’s power in Spain was such that he was appointed an admiral without once having been to sea. Ferdinand, who was just as weak and pusillanimous as his father, loathed Godoy, a sentiment that was mutual.

I] did not invade Spain in order to put one of [my] own family on the throne,’ Napoleon was to claim in 1814, ‘but to revolutionize her; to make her a kingdom of laws, to abolish the Inquisition, feudal rights, and the inordinate privileges of certain classes.’

On his way to Bayonne ordinary Spaniards took off their jackets and placed them under the wheels of his carriage in order to ‘preserve the marks of a journey which occasioned the happiest moment of their lives’, assuming – as did Ferdinand himself – that Napoleon would recognize him as the rightful king of Spain.

Under the terms of a series of agreements at Bayonne, Ferdinand would cede the crown of Spain back to his father Charles IV, on condition that Charles should then immediately cede it in turn to Napoleon, who would then pass it to his own brother Joseph.71 Meanwhile, Godoy was spirited out of Spain by Murat, to the delight of María Luisa who could now be with him, and it seemed that yet another country had fallen into the lap of the Bonaparte family.

Spain was of such a size that in the provinces that did rebel, regional insurgent governments (juntas) could be set up around the country and France had to fight a war against both the regular Spanish army and local guerrilla bands.

The French started by besieging Girona, Valencia, Saragossa and other strategically important cities – indeed there were more sieges undertaken in the Peninsular War than in all other theatres of the Napoleonic Wars put together.

Spain had been easily defeated by France in 1794–5 and Napoleon assumed that in the absence of any Spanish general and army of any distinction, it would happen again. Despite the experience of Calabria, he had not learned how effective a guerrilla insurgency can sometimes be against even the most powerful and well-disciplined army.

As in any guerrilla insurgency, some of the partisans were motivated by patriotism, others by revenge for what were undeniably atrocities, others by opportunism, and several bandit groups preyed on their fellow Spaniards.

‘The King of Prussia is a hero compared to the Prince of the Asturias,’ Napoleon told Talleyrand; ‘he is indifferent to everything; very materialistic, eats four times a day and hasn’t got a single idea in his head.’

Stockholm Syndrome

they dubbed Joseph ‘El Rey Intruso’ (the intruder king), and even before he entered Madrid there were full-scale insurrections in Biscay, Catalonia, Navarre, Valencia, Andalusia, Estremadura, Galicia, León, the Asturias and part of both Castiles, and many Iberian ports were handed over to the Royal Navy.

Napoleon’s impatience had got the better of him. As Savary later admitted: ‘We rushed the outcome of the affair, and we didn’t show enough consideration for national self-esteem.’

It certainly appealed to those pro-French collaborators, largely from the liberal, enlightened, middle and professional classes, known as the josefinos or afrancesados (Francophiles), but they made up only a small minority of the population of what was then very much still a rural, illiterate, economically backward, ultra-Catholic and reactionary country.

On May 25 the fortified medieval city of Saragossa, the capital of Aragon, rose in revolt under the command of Colonel Palafox, who had escaped from France dressed as a peasant. He had only 220 men and the Spanish equivalent of £20 6s 8d in the treasury, but nonetheless he declared war on the French Empire.

When Lefebvre-Desnouettes demanded Palafox’s surrender with two words, ‘La capitulation’, Palafox replied with three: ‘Guerra al cuchillo’ (War by knife).

a catastrophe befell French arms when General Pierre Dupont surrendered his entire corps of 18,000 men, 36 guns and all his colours to General Francisco Castaños’s Army of Andalusia after being defeated at the battle of Bailén. When the Royal Navy, which had not been party to the surrender terms, refused to repatriate Dupont’s army back to France as promised by Castaños, his troops were despatched to the Balearic isle of Cabrera, where more than half were starved to death, though Dupont and his senior officers were allowed home.

The news of Bailén reverberated around Europe; it was France’s worst defeat on land since 1793. Napoleon was of course completely livid. He court-martialled Dupont, imprisoned him in the Fort de Joux for two years and stripped him of his peerage (he had been a count of the empire), later saying, ‘Out of all the generals who served in Spain, we ought to have selected a certain number and sent them to the scaffold.

Over the next five years Wellington enormously helped the Spanish and Portuguese regular and guerrilla forces to expel the French from Iberia at the cost of fewer than 10,000 British lives.

When it became clear that Wellington was indeed likely to be a formidable opponent, in August 1810 Napoleon inserted a paragraph in the Moniteur describing him as a mere ‘sepoy general’, that is a soldier who had only commanded Indian troops. He was perhaps unaware that the Indian soldiers fighting for the British included some superb fighting men.103

‘You are aware of the esteem and attachment I entertain for that minister,’ he told Rapp – so he was therefore prepared to overlook, and perhaps did not fully realize, that this access allowed Talleyrand to sell secrets whenever he chose.

‘Sire,’ Talleyrand said to Alexander at the first of several secret meetings at Erfurt, ‘what have you come to do here? It is for you to save Europe, and the only way of doing this will be for you to resist Napoleon. The French are a civilised people; their sovereign is not.’116

Russia’s adherence to the Continental System had damaged her economy, preventing her from selling wheat, timber, tallow and hemp to Britain. The mere existence of the Duchy of Warsaw left her concerned about the re-emergence of a kingdom of Poland.

Napoleon took advantage of being in Erfurt to meet his greatest living literary hero, who lived only 15 miles away in Weimar. On October 2, 1808, Goethe lunched with Napoleon at Erfurt, with Talleyrand, Daru, Savary and Berthier in attendance.

Goethe later reported that Napoleon ‘made observations at a high intellectual level, as a man who has studied the tragical scene with the attention of a criminal judge’. Napoleon told him he felt that French theatre had strayed too far from nature and truth.

Napoleon suggested that Goethe write another play on Caesar’s assassination, portraying it as a blunder. He went on to denounce Tacitus’ prejudices, obscurantism and ‘detestable style’, and also the way that Shakespeare mixed comedy with tragedy, ‘the terrible with the burlesque’, and expressed his surprise that such a ‘great spirit’ as Goethe could admire such undefined genres.

Goethe was to describe his time discussing literature and poetry with Napoleon as one of the most gratifying experiences of his life.

and the Tsar said, ‘I accept it as a mark of your friendship: Your Majesty is well assured that I shall never draw it against you!’

The Erfurt talks reinforced the agreement reached at Tilsit to divide Europe between France and Russia, but despite the many hours of intimate discussions Napoleon and Alexander came to few concrete arrangements.

Once the French started responding to guerrilla terror tactics – which included mutilation (especially of the genitals), blinding, castration, crucifixions, nailing to doors, sawing in half, decapitation, burying alive, skinning alive, and so on – with almost equally vicious measures, the fighting in Spain swiftly took on a character that was a far cry from the warfare of élan, esprit de corps and gorgeous uniforms that had characterized Napoleon’s earlier campaigns, which for all their carnage had been generally free of deliberate torture and sadism.

If the war in Spain could have been won in the manner of his earlier campaigns, by defeating the enemy’s regular army and occupying his capital, it is safe to assume that Napoleon would have soon been victorious.

Bausset, who spoke Spanish and thus translated for the Emperor, recorded that Napoleon walked outside the walls ‘without taking much notice of the projectiles which were discharged from the highest points of Madrid’.

British expeditionary force under General Sir John Moore had returned to Salamanca, 110 miles west of Madrid. Bausset recorded that he ‘experienced a lively joy at finding that he could at last meet these enemies on terra firma’.

Together with the Alpine crossing and the Eylau campaign this convinced him that his men were hardy enough for any climatic conditions, a disastrous conclusion for his decision-making in the future.

The ‘Spanish ulcer’ forced Napoleon to station 300,000 men in the Iberian peninsula in the winter of 1808; the number rose to 370,000 for the spring offensive of 1810 and to 406,000 in 1811, before falling to 290,000 in 1812 and to 224,000 in 1813. Except at the very beginning, these were troops he simply could not afford to spare.

‘Artillery should always be placed in the most advantageous positions, and as far as possible in the front of the line of cavalry and infantry, without compromising the safety of the guns.’ Napoleon’s Military Maxim No.

‘While all the cabinets of the Allied powers believed he was engaged in operations in the north of Spain,’ recorded General Dumas, ‘he had returned to the centre of the empire, was organising another great army … surprising by this incredible activity those who expected to surprise him.’

Napoleon later contrasted the campaigning in Spain and Austria, describing the Austrians to Davout as ‘a nation so good, so reasonable, so cold, so tolerant, so far removed from all excesses that there is not an example of a single Frenchman having been assassinated during the war in Germany’, whereas the Spanish were fanatics.