Napoleon the Great

by Andrew Roberts

‘I will remember you and you will be grateful,’ Napoleon told him, ‘you are well marked.’ Months later, when Berthier suggested a man to fill a vacancy in the Guard chasseurs, Napoleon demurred, saying he wanted to give the promotion to Lion. Napoleon

‘With the army I generally travelled in a carriage during the day with a good, thick pelisse on, because night is the time when a commander-in-chief should work,’ Napoleon said years later. ‘If he fatigues himself uselessly during the day, he will be too tired to work in the evening … If I had slept the night before Eggmühl I could never have executed that superb manoeuvre, the finest I ever made … I multiplied myself by my activity. I woke up Lannes by kicking him repeatedly; he was so sound asleep.’

After the battle of Ratisbon, a grognard asked Napoleon for the cross of the Légion d’Honneur, claiming that he had given him a watermelon at Jaffa when it ‘was so terribly hot’. Napoleon refused him on such a paltry pretext, at which the veteran added indignantly, ‘Well, don’t you reckon seven wounds received at the bridge of Arcole, at Lodi and Castiglione, at the Pyramids, at Acre, Austerlitz, Friedland; eleven campaigns in Italy, Egypt, Austria, Prussia, Poland …’ at which a laughing emperor cut him short and made him a chevalier of the Légion with a 1,200-franc pension, fastening the cross on his breast there and then. ‘It was by familiarities of this kind that the Emperor made the soldiers adore him,’ noted Marbot, ‘but it was a means available only to a commander whom frequent victories had made illustrious: any other general would have injured his reputation by it.’27

Napoleon, just east of Aspern, considered retreating when he learned about the damage to the bridge, since one of the cardinal laws of war is never to fight with a river to one’s back, but his generals (except the silent Berthier) assured him they could hold the ground.

Today Lannes lies in caverne XXII of the Panthéon, in a coffin draped with the tricolour, under nine flags hanging from walls covered with the names of his battles. ‘The loss of the Duke of Montebello, who died this morning, has grieved me much,’ Napoleon wrote to Josephine on May 31. ‘So everything ends!!! Adieu, my love; if you can do anything toward consoling the Marshal’s poor widow, do it.’

what could be worse if I hadn’t made peace with Russia? And what advantage do I get from their alliance, if they aren’t capable of ensuring peace in Germany? It is more likely that they would have been against me if a remnant of human respect hadn’t prevented them from betraying right away the sworn faith; let’s not be abused: they all have a rendezvous on my grave, but they don’t dare to gather there … It’s not an alliance I have here; I’ve been duped.

The problem, as he told Caulaincourt, was that ‘Society in the salons is always in a state of hostility against the government. Everything is criticized and nothing praised.’

Napoleon had now amassed 130,800 infantry, 23,300 cavalry and no fewer than 544 guns manned by 10,000 artillerymen, three times his force at Aspern-Essling. Captain Blaze recalled that ‘all the languages of Europe were spoken’ on Lobau Island – ‘Italian, Polish, Arab, Portuguese, Spanish, and every kind of German’.

Through intense planning and preparation, Napoleon got this enormous polyglot force – roughly the same number as attacked Normandy on D-Day – across one of Europe’s largest rivers into enemy territory on a single night, with all its horses, cannon, wagons, supplies and ammunition, and without losing a single man.47 It was an astonishing logistical achievement. As soon as his men reached the far bank they crossed over the Marchfeld to face Archduke Charles’s army numbering 113,800 infantry, 14,600 cavalry and 414 guns. The battle they were about to fight was the largest in European history up to that point.

Aderklaa – so nonchalantly evacuated by Bernadotte – saw 44,000 Austrians engage 35,000 French and Germans. ‘Is that the scientific manoeuvre by which you were going to make the Archduke lay down his arms?’ Napoleon asked Bernadotte sarcastically, after which he removed him from command with the words: ‘A bungler like you is no good to me.’

When he woke and saw that Markgrafneusiedl was still in Davout’s hands, he pronounced the battle won.52 Napoleon’s ability to sleep on a battlefield with 700 cannon firing is all the more remarkable considering that on or near the Raasdorf knoll that served as his headquarters no fewer than twenty-six staff officers were killed or wounded that day.

‘Sire, they are firing on the headquarters.’ ‘Monsieur,’ the Emperor replied, ‘in war all accidents are possible.’53 And when a staff officer had his helmet knocked off by a cannonball, Napoleon joked: ‘It’s a good job you’re not any taller!’

Once Bessières recovered he teased him that his absence cost him 20,000 prisoners.57 His charge was the last decisive use of cavalry on a Napoleonic battlefield, just as the battle as a whole was the start of the dominance of artillery. Cavalry would no longer be the pivotal arm in warfare, though it was to take several decades before this was fully appreciated.

His 8,000 men now formed a gigantic, hollow, open-backed square 900 yards wide and 600 yards deep, which he marched towards the Austrian line, with cavalry covering its open back. It was the last time such a formation was used in the Napoleonic Wars because it was so hard to control; the front battalions could fire but not those behind them, and it naturally drew much artillery fire.

Although the name of Wagram is to be found in marble alongside Austerlitz and Arcole at the foot of Napoleon’s tomb at Les Invalides, in fact it was something of a pyrrhic victory.

Napoleon’s political support from inside the annexed territories came from many constituencies: urban elites who didn’t want to return to the rule of their local Legitimists, administrative reformers who valued efficiency, religious minorities such as Protestants and Jews whose rights were protected by law, liberals who believed in concepts such as secular education and the liberating power of divorce, Poles and other nationalities who hoped for national self-determination, businessmen (at least until the Continental System started to bite), admirers of the simplicity of the Code Napoléon, opponents of the way the guilds had worked to restrain trade, middle-class reformers, in France those who wanted legal protection for their purchases of hitherto ecclesiastical or princely confiscated property, and – especially in Germany – peasants who no longer had to pay feudal dues.

The result was a hierarchical and uniform administration controlled from Paris in which, in the words of an admiring contemporary, ‘the executive chain descends without interruption from the minister to the administered and transmits the law and the government’s orders to the furthest ramification of the social order’.12 It was the fulfilment of the dream of the eighteenth-century enlightened despots.

Of course practically they often had little choice but to serve the French in the short term, but for many the advent of French military victory gave them an opportunity to adopt modern practices from a revolutionary system shorn of the guillotine and the Terror.

It is a myth, however, that Napoleon was a believer in pan-Europeanism; in 1812 he propagated the idea that he was the defender of European Christian civilization, holding back the barbarian Asiatic hordes of Russia, and made much of the idea of European unity when constructing his legacy, but his Empire was always primarily a French construct, not a European one.

Excommunication was no laughing matter, however, since in Poland, Italy and France there were millions of pious Catholics who now had to rethink their loyalty to an infidel emperor.

This was especially problematic at a time when he was hoping to win the allegiance of the ultra-Catholic Spaniards, whose priests were to use Napoleon’s new heretical status as a potent propaganda tool against the French occupiers.

under orders from Napoleon, Savary took the extraordinary step of having General Étienne Radet arrest the Pope in the Vatican, giving him half an hour to pack his bags before escorting him to the bishop’s palace in the small Italian Riviera port of Savona. This allowed Pope Pius to make one of the wriest remarks of the nineteenth century. ‘Assuredly, my son,’ he told Radet, ‘those orders will not bring divine orders upon you.’16 Napoleon meanwhile told his brother-in-law Prince Camillo Borghese, who was governor-general of the Alpine region which included Savona, that ‘The guard of the Pope should have all the appearance of a guard of honour.’

Pius behaved with great dignity, but it was a sorry tale of strong-arm tactics with absolutely no advantage for Napoleon. The only material change was that British goods now had to be smuggled into Livorno rather than landing openly on the docks as hitherto. While pious Catholics privately fumed at the treatment meted out to the Vicar of Christ, Napoleon found an historical precedent for his action, declaring that Rome had always been part of Charlemagne’s Empire.

‘As long as they will attack good troops like the English, in good positions without making sure they can be carried,’ he continued, ‘my men will be led to death to no purpose.’

Confining her armed forces to 150,000 men, and almost cutting her off from the sea by annexing the Illyrian provinces (she retained Fiume), Napoleon effectively reduced Austria to a second-rate power.

The Treaty of Schönbrunn has been criticized as a Carthaginian peace, which ultimately worked against Napoleon’s interests because it forced the Austrians to go to war against him yet again, but that happened only after he had been catastrophically defeated by Russia in 1812.

‘I am touched by your suffering, but I wish that you were more courageous. To live is to suffer, and a human being who is worthy of honour must always struggle for mastery of self.’

‘All tenderness on the Emperor’s part, all consideration for my mother had vanished,’ wrote Hortense of this painful time, ‘he became unjust and vexatious in his attitude … I wished that the divorce had already been pronounced.’

Had his Empire been an ancient, established one it might have survived the accession of a brother or nephew, but Napoleon’s Empire was not yet five years old, and he came to the conclusion that for the Bonaparte dynasty to survive he needed a son. After thirteen years of trying, the forty-six-year-old Josephine clearly wasn’t going to produce one.

‘Atlas carried the world, but after him came chaos.’

Ironically, although it was to get an imperial heir that Napoleon divorced Josephine, it would turn out to be her grandson, rather than any offspring of Napoleon, who would become the next emperor of France and her direct descendants who today sit on the thrones of Belgium, Denmark, Sweden, Norway and Luxembourg. His sit on none.

The Tsar of All the Russias was therefore perfectly willing to sacrifice his teenage sister to the man his family saw as a forty-year-old Corsican parvenu in order to keep Poland partitioned.

nationalist propaganda movement start in Russia, and criticism of France was once more allowed in the press. Francophobic literary and philological clubs were also permitted.

Cambacérès denied it, saying that he knew Napoleon would end up going to war with whichever country wasn’t chosen, and ‘I dread a march to St Petersburg more than a march to Vienna.’

Napoleon was eventually to come to regret his second marriage, blaming it for his downfall. ‘Assuredly but for my marriage with Marie I never should have made war on Russia,’ he said, ‘but I felt certain of the support of Austria, and I was wrong, for Austria is the natural enemy of France.’

The Electorate of Bavaria, Grand Duchy of Württemberg and region of Westphalia had been turned into kingdoms by Napoleon as recently as 1807, and Alexander feared the Duchy of Warsaw might be next.

If Napoleon is to be criticized, as he sometimes is, for the paucity of great literature during his reign, then logically he must also deserve praise for the great art produced in the Empire period, which he did so much to encourage. Of course he used culture for political propaganda, as had Louis XIV, the French revolutionaries and indeed the Emperor Augustus and the many other Roman emperors Napoleon admired.

Napoleon’s image and deeds were immortalized in paintings, prints, tapestries, medals, porcelain, objets d’art and sculpture as a way both of legitimizing his rule and, in one art historian’s phrase, of ‘inscribing himself permanently on the French memory’.

In the age before photography no one expected precise verisimilitude in art. Nobody thought Napoleon actually crossed the Alps on a constantly rearing stallion, as in David’s painting, for example; rather it was intended as a magnificent allegorical comment on the glory of the achievement.

(Today it can be seen in the stairwell of Apsley House in London, where the Duke of Wellington’s guests used to hang their umbrellas on it.)

By May 29, Napoleon’s mania for micro-management had got the better of him, and he started sending Masséna detailed orders about where to march and when, through the medium of Masséna’s hated enemy Berthier.

Napoleon assumed that Masséna’s much larger force would easily overcome Wellington’s 25,000 men, entirely failing to take into account the additional 25,000 Portuguese serving with Wellington.

Seven thousand Portuguese labourers had constructed no fewer than three lines across the 29-mile Lisbon peninsula, including 165 fortified redoubts, defended by 628 guns.96 The Royal Navy established a telegraph system for rapid communication along each of them and the flanks were covered by gunboats anchored in the River Tagus and the sea.

Napoleon might deride Wellington as a mere ‘sepoy general’ in the Moniteur, but in private he was impressed with Wellington’s ruthless scorched-earth policy on the retreat to Torres Vedras, telling Chaptal: ‘In Europe only Wellington and I are capable of carrying out these measures. But there is this difference between him and me, which is that France … would blame me, while England will approve of him.’

They clearly didn’t mind that their future monarch was a former rabid republican who had had ‘Death to Kings’ tattooed on his chest, and assumed that after their defeat by Russia and the loss of Finland, having a French marshal on their throne – especially one related to Napoleon by marriage – would bring them a useful alliance.

The year 1810 had been a mixed one for Napoleon; although his Empire had reached the zenith of its power and territorial extent, he had made mistakes that boded ill for its future. Most of these errors had been unforced, and many of his problems, we can now see, were self-inflicted. He need not have quarrelled publicly with the Pope, certainly not to the point of arresting him. Impatience to make a dynastic alliance had offended Alexander and made him suspicious over Poland, even though Napoleon had no intention of restoring that kingdom.

The Austrian marriage was never going to be enough to assuage the harsh peace of Schönbrunn. Masséna should have been supported properly, or not sent to Portugal at all; better still, Napoleon should have gone there himself to fight Wellington.

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