Napoleon the Great

by Andrew Roberts

Napoleon decided to return as soon as possible to a vulnerable France facing a new Coalition led by Britain, Russia and Austria. Long accused afterwards of deserting his men, in fact he was marching to the sound of the guns, for it was absurd to have France’s best general stuck in a strategic sideshow in the Orient when France itself was under threat of invasion.

The key point about Brumaire, however, is not that the Directory was abolished, since it was clearly failing and likely to fall, but that both houses of the legislature were effectively abolished too, along with the Constitution of Year III. The legislature had not been deeply infected with the Directory’s unpopularity; the neo-Jacobins were no great threat, and the nation was in no immediate danger. Yet Sieyès and Napoleon succeeded in closing down both the Elders and the Five Hundred without any significant popular reaction. After a decade of Revolution, many Frenchmen were desperate for leadership and recognized that the parliamentary process inhibited that, as did a constitution that was next to impossible to amend. They were thus willing to see representative government temporarily suspended in order for Napoleon and his co-conspirators to cut the Gordian knot. Certainly public opinion in Paris was indifferent to whether Napoleon had used force to gain power or not. Army officers prize order, discipline and efficiency, each of which Napoleon considered by then to be more important than liberty, equality and fraternity, and at that moment the French people agreed with him. He was able to present France with a narrative of national success, whereas, as he himself put it, ‘These Directors know how to do nothing for the imagination of the nation.’91 Although his victories were part of Napoleon’s attraction, so too were the peace treaties he had delivered to a nation now e...

Lucien’s fiddling of the figures provides a perfect insight into one of the most characteristic aspects of the Napoleonic story. Napoleon was always going to win by a huge landslide, yet the Bonapartists simply couldn’t resist exaggerating even those numbers, thereby allowing the opposition – neo-Jacobins, royalists, liberals, moderates and others – to argue in their salons and underground cells that the whole process was a fraud.

When d’Enghien’s execution became public, a shocked Europe almost universally recalled the Corsican penchant for vendettas, and Pelet recorded that Parisians worried that Napoleon had ‘fallen into the evil ways’ of Robespierre.69 Liberals across Europe started to perceive Napoleon differently: this was the moment when René de Chateaubriand and Benjamin Constant turned against him. In reply to a Russian protest over the execution, Napoleon ordered his ambassador to St Petersburg, General d’Hédouville, to call for his passports, which he did on June 7, inaugurating a period of very bad Franco-Russian relations that was eventually to erupt into war.

By July 1810 Napoleon appreciated that the Continental System was not working as he had hoped, but rather than scrap it altogether he decided to modify it, introducing ‘Le Nouveau Système’, which permitted the selling of special licences that allowed certain individuals and companies to trade with Britain in a number of named products. The sale of these was open to abuse – Bourrienne skimmed off a vast fortune selling them in Hamburg, for example – and rife with accusations of favouritism.

Bureaucracy plagued the licensing system as further decrees were promulgated over the years. In the area between Antwerp on the Channel and Lorient on the Bay of Biscay for example, one-sixth of all exports had to be of wine, with the rest composed of brandies, seeds (except grass) and non-prohibited French merchandise. The area of the Charente Inférieure could export grains, but half of exports there too had to be wines and brandies.

The Russians considered Le Nouveau Système to be an outrage against them, since they were still banned from trading with Britain, whereas French manufacturers seemed to be evading the blockade.

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.

Yet even if Napoleon had defeated Russia in 1812, it is doubtful that he could have enforced the Continental System. Would he have then annexed the rest of the south Baltic coastline, and installed French customs officials at St Petersburg? He probably assumed that a defeated Alexander would administer the System for him again, as he had between 1807 and 1810, but it is doubtful that this crucial aspect of his plan was properly thought through.

He delayed the invasion until forage would be plentiful, but nonetheless the heat and their diet of wet grass and unripe rye killed 10,000 horses in the first week of the campaign alone.106 As horses required 20 pounds of forage per day, he had a maximum of three weeks before supplies would start to become inadequate.

Opinion in the Russian high command was split between the aristocratic generals who supported Bagration’s counter-offensive strategy and the ‘foreigners’ (often Baltic Germans) who supported Barclay de Tolly’s strategy of withdrawal, essentially that of Bennigsen in 1807 except across a far wider area. By the time Napoleon crossed the Niemen the latter had won, partly because the sheer size of the Grande Armée made a counter-offensive unthinkable. Having a smaller army would therefore paradoxically have helped Napoleon by tempting the Russians into the early battle he logistically needed to fight, and would also have allowed him (because of its lesser supply needs) more time to fight it. Had Alexander appointed the Russian-born Bagration as war minister and commander of the First Army of the West instead of Barclay – an appointment that would have been popular in the Russian officer corps – Napoleon might have destroyed the Russian army at, or even before, Vilnius. Instead he picked the less flamboyant, more incisive Barclay and stuck by Barclay’s plan to lure the Grande Armée deep into Russian territory, stretching its supply lines away from the huge military depots in Mainz, Danzig, Königsberg and elsewhere.

An average of 1,000 horses were to die for every day of the 175 days that the Grande Armée spent in Russia.

That single deception, therefore, involved three senior officers (and possibly Murat too), or at least required them to be compliant. Somehow the culture of the army had changed, so that Napoleon, who used to be so close to his men, was now regularly lied to by his senior commanders. He

Napoleon had lost some 524,000 men, around 100,000 to 120,000 of whom had been captured. Many of those captured died over the coming years, and virtually none returned to France before Waterloo,

on the Russian retreat

Many units were at just 5 per cent of their strength: Davout’s corps of 66,000 was down to 2,200; of the 47,864 original effectives of Oudinot’s corps, only 4,653 remained; the Imperial Guard of 51,000 was left with a little over 2,000;

on the Russian retreat

but the British were opposed to a peace that left France in possession of any part of the Belgian coast from which Britain could be invaded, specifically Antwerp. Castlereagh’s opposition to Metternich’s terms wrecked the Frankfurt peace attempt, especially once he had arrived in Europe in January 1814 and encouraged the Tsar to oppose peace of any kind with Napoleon.78 He did not believe that a lasting peace would be possible if Napoleon remained on the throne of France.

In 1792–3, the Austrian and Prussian armies invading France had numbered only 80,000 men, but were confronted by 220,000 Frenchmen under arms. In January 1814 Napoleon faced a total of 957,000 Allied troops with fewer than 220,000 men in the field – 60,000 of whom under Soult and 37,000 under Suchet were fighting Wellington’s Anglo-Spanish-Portuguese army in the south-west of France and 50,000 under Eugène were defending Italy.

After the Terror, and the decadence and disorder of the Directory, the majority of Frenchmen wanted a conservative Republic, and they got one from a man whose ideal society looked like merely a much larger version of the Army, led politically as well as militarily by its commander-in-chief. ‘We have done with the romance of the Revolution,’ the First Consul told an early meeting of his Conseil d’État, ‘we must now begin its history.’4 In many respects, he was the last and greatest of the enlightened authoritarians of eighteenth-century Europe who had begun to introduce rationalism to government and improvement to the lives of their subjects. Goethe said that Napoleon was ‘always enlightened by reason … He was in a permanent state of enlightenment’.

Napoleon was thus not some nemesis-doomed monster, a modern exemplar of ancient Greek drama or any of the dozens of historical constructions that have been thrust upon him. Rather, Napoleon’s life and career stand as a rebuke to determinist analyses of history which explain events in terms of vast impersonal forces and minimize the part played by individuals. We should find this uplifting, since, as George Home, that midshipman on board HMS Bellerophon, put it in his memoirs, ‘He showed us what one little human creature like ourselves could accomplish in a span so short.’13 Napoleon the Great? Yes, certainly.