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‘A general’s most important talent is to know the mind of the soldier and gain his confidence, and in both respects the French soldier is more difficult to lead than another. He is not a machine that must be made to move, he is a reasonable being who needs leadership.’ Napoleon
He believed it was essential for everyone to be treated according to the same rules, appreciating, as he put it, that ‘If there were a single privilege granted to anyone, no matter whom, not one man would obey the order to march.’
His special ability, amounting to something approaching genius, was to translate the sketchiest of general commands into precise written orders for every demi-brigade.
The French had moved significantly faster than their enemy, and he had employed a concentration of forces that reversed the numerical odds for just long enough to be decisive.
‘The strength of the army,’ he stated, ‘like power in mechanics, is the product of multiplying the mass by the velocity.’32
‘It is astonishing what power words have over men,’ Napoleon said of the 32nd years later.30
The more successful he was on the battlefield, however, and the more the Directory depended on him for their solvency and prestige, the less interference he would face over his choices.
The old maxim ‘March separately, fight together’ could not have been better followed.
His leadership qualities – acting with harshness when he thought it deserved, but bestowing high praise on other occasions – produced the esprit de corps so necessary to victory.
‘In war,’ he was to say in 1808, ‘moral factors account for three-quarters of the whole; relative material strength accounts for only one-quarter.’82 His personal courage further bonded him to his men.
On campaign Napoleon demonstrated an approachability that endeared him to his men. They were permitted to put their cases forward for being awarded medals, promotions and even pensions, after which, once he had checked the veracity of their claims with their commanding officer, the matter was quickly settled.
Baron Louis de Bausset-Roquefort, who served him on many campaigns, recalled that Napoleon ‘heard, interrogated, and decided at once; if it was a refusal, the reasons were explained in a manner which softened the disappointment’.84 Such accessibility to the commander-in-chief is impossible to conceive in the British army of the Duke of Wellington or in the Austrian army of Archduke Charles, but in republican France it was an invaluable means of keeping in touch with the needs and concerns of his men.
‘Conceal from me none of your wants,’ he told the 17th Demi-Brigade, ‘suppress no complaints you have to make of your superiors. I am here to do justice to all, and the weaker party is especially entitled to my protection.’88 The notion that le petit caporal was on their side against les gros bonnets (‘big-hats’) was generally held throughout the army.
Far more often, of course, he lavished praise: ‘Your three battalions could be as six in my eyes,’ he called to the 44th Line in the Eylau campaign. ‘And we shall prove it!’ they shouted back.91
‘Severe to the officers,’ was his stated mantra, ‘kindly to the men.’
Placing oneself in the limelight while seeming modestly to edge away from it is one of the most skilful of all political moves, and Napoleon had mastered it perfectly.
The officer corps was thus at the forefront of the action, a key aspect of their service that won them their soldiers’ affection and respect.
The greatest long-term achievements of Napoleon’s Egyptian campaign were not military or strategic, but intellectual, cultural and artistic.
‘The men who have changed the world never succeeded by winning over the powerful, but always by stirring the masses. The first method is a resort to intrigue and only brings limited results. The latter is the course of genius and changes the face of the world.’
‘The masses … should be directed without their being aware of it.’
The placing of property rights before those of equality and liberty was indicative of how Napoleon intended to defend the interests of tradesmen, employers, strivers and the owners of the biens nationaux – the kind of people who struggled to run small businesses like a mulberry orchard.
When he spoke of equality, he meant equality before the law and not of economic situation.
‘Confidence comes from below, power from above.’
On another occasion he declared: ‘The printing press is an arsenal; it cannot be private property.’
‘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
‘My true glory is not to have won forty battles … What nothing will destroy, what will live for ever, is my Civil Code.’
‘The clergy is a power that is never quiet,’ Napoleon once said. ‘You cannot be under obligations to it, wherefore you must be its master.’5 His treaty with the Papacy has been accurately described as attempting ‘to enlist the parish clergy as Napoleon’s “moral prefects” ’.
‘Wishing to be an atheist does not make you one.’
A major problem with Christianity, as he told Bertrand, was that it ‘does not excite courage’ because ‘It takes too much care to go to heaven.’15
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.’20
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.
‘Law must do nothing but impose a general principle. It would be vain if one were to try to foresee every possible situation; experience would prove that much has been omitted.’
The silver one-franc piece was to weigh five grams, and quickly became western Europe’s standard unit of currency. Its value and metallic composition remained constant until 1926.
He quickly taught himself to ask short questions that demanded direct answers.
(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.)
Napoleon had been able to extract great concessions due to the British desire for peace, which, because of the disruption of trade with Europe from nine years of war, amounted almost to desperation.
Everything passes rapidly on earth, with the exception of the mark we leave on history.’
By 1812 Napoleon didn’t believe any colonies could be held in perpetuity, predicting that they would all eventually ‘follow the example of the United States. You grow tired of waiting for orders from five thousand miles away; tired of obeying a government which seems foreign to you because it’s remote, and because of necessity it subordinates you to its own local interest, which it cannot sacrifice to yours.’
‘Ambassadors are essentially spies with titles.’
The lack of a commercial treaty attached to the political one meant that the powerful British merchant class soon came to oppose a peace that gave them no privileged access to the markets of France, Holland, Spain, Switzerland, Genoa and (later) Etruria.
‘There are no people more impudent or more demanding than the Swiss,’ he was later to say. ‘Their country is about as big as a man’s hand, and they have the most extraordinary pretensions.’
In fact Whitworth merely asked for his passports, the traditional ambassadorial request prior to a declaration of war.
Instead, by helping the United States to continental greatness, and enriching the French treasury in the process, Napoleon was able to prophesy: ‘I have just given to England a maritime rival that sooner or later will humble her pride.’
‘If an obscurity did not already exist,’ Napoleon advised, ‘it would perhaps be a good policy to put one there.’
‘We are here to guide public opinion, not to discuss it.’
‘Impossible, sir! I am not acquainted with the word; it is not in the French language, erase it from your dictionary.’8
Astonishingly few Frenchmen opposed the return to an hereditary monarchy only eleven years after the execution of Louis XVI, and those who did were promised the opportunity to vote against it in a plebiscite.
You tell me that class distinctions are baubles used by monarchs, I defy you to show me a republic, ancient or modern, in which distinctions have not existed. You call these medals and ribbons baubles; well, it is with such baubles that men are led. I would not say this in public, but in an assembly of wise statesmen it should be said. I don’t think that the French love liberty and equality: the French are not changed by ten years of revolution: they are what the Gauls were, fierce and fickle. They have one feeling: honour. We must nourish that feeling. The people clamour for distinction. See
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‘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.’
