Napoleon the Great

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.’

In 1792, France became a crusading nation, determined to export the values and ideals of the Revolution to the rest of Europe. Europe’s monarchs would have none of it, and formed the first of seven coalitions to resist the encroachments. It was these wars that Napoleon inherited and, through his military capacity, for a time took to a triumphant conclusion. In Britain, which had already had its political revolution 140 years earlier and thus enjoyed many of the benefits that the Revolution brought to France, Napoleon’s threat first to invade and then economically to strangle her into submission ensured that successive governments were unsurprisingly determined to overthrow him. The ruling dynasties of Austria, Prussia and Russia were equally unsurprisingly resistant to his offers of peace on French terms. As a consequence, war was declared on him far more often than he declared it on others: by the Austrians in 1800, by the British in 1803, by the Austrians’ invading his ally Bavaria in 1805, by the Prussians in 1806 and by the Austrians in 1809. The attacks on Portugal and Spain in 1807 and 1808 and Russia in 1812 were indeed initiated by Napoleon to try to enforce the Continental System – although as we have seen, the Tsar was planning an attack on him in 1812 – but the hostilities of 1813, and those of 1814 and 1815, were all declared on him. He made peace offers before all of them; indeed he made no fewer than four separate offers to Britain between the collapse of Amiens in 1803 and 1812. The Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars cost a total of around three million military and one million civilian deaths, of whom 1.4 million were French (916,000 from the Empire period, of whom fewer than 90,000 were killed in action).

In 1804 he was proclaimed ‘Emperor of the French Republic’, apparently a contradiction in terms, but in fact a true characterization of the nature of his rule.

Napoleon managed to incorporate elements from both the Ancien Régime and the Revolutionary armies to create a new military culture motivated by honour, patriotism and a fierce personal devotion to himself which took his troops across the sands of Egypt, the great rivers of Europe and, ultimately disastrously, the frozen wastes of Russia.

Any general – which Napoleon became at the age of twenty-four – must ultimately be judged by the outcome of his battles. Although his conquests ended in defeat and ignominious imprisonment, over the course of his short but packed military life Napoleon fought sixty battles and sieges and lost only seven – Acre, Aspern-Essling, Leipzig, La Rothière, Lâon, Arcis and Waterloo. Napoleon’s feeling for battle, and capacity for battlefield decision-making, was extraordinary. Walking the ground of fifty-three of his sixty battlefields, I was regularly astounded by his instinctive feeling for topography, his acuity in judging distance and choosing ground, his sense of timing. ‘There is a moment in combat when the slightest manoeuvre is decisive and gives superiority,’ he once wrote. ‘It is the drop of water that starts the overflow.’1 He certainly never lacked confidence in his own capacity as a military leader. On St Helena, when asked why he had not taken Frederick the Great’s sword when he had visited Sanssouci, he replied, ‘Because I had my own.’ (In fact, he did take Frederick’s sword back to Les Invalides.)

Napoleon was buried with full military honours in Torbett’s Spring, a beautiful spot a mile from Longwood punctuated by willow trees where he had sometimes visited. He was dressed in his uniform of a colonel in the Chasseurs à Cheval. The coffin was borne along a goat-path to the grave by British grenadiers of the 66th and 20th Regiments, prompting one spectator to note ‘the irony that the regimental colours under which the Emperor was being buried had the golden letters of “Talavera”, “Albuera”, “Vitoria” and “The Pyrenees” woven on them in strange mockery’.175 Three salvoes of fifteen guns and three volleys of musketry were fired, creating ‘a succession of fine echoes from the hills and ravines’.176 Yet the tomb was unmarked, because even after the former Emperor’s death, Lowe would not allow his gravestone to feature the imperial title ‘Napoleon’, while Bertrand and Montholon would not accept Lowe’s wording of the non-royal ‘Napoleon Bonaparte’, so it was left blank.177 (It can be seen today in the courtyard of Longwood, still without wording.) His remains were removed from the grave and taken to Paris in 1840 by Bertrand and Gourgaud and given a magnificent funeral on December 2, the anniversary of his coronation and the battle of Austerlitz. Though the day was freezing, an estimated one million Frenchmen lined the route of the cortège through Paris. Attending his interment at Les Invalides were four of his marshals: Soult, Moncey, Oudinot and Grouchy. Others who were still living but who had turned against him – Bernadotte, Marmont and Victor – did not attend.

‘Does a man have the right to kill himself?’ he had asked in his 1786 essay, ‘On Suicide’. ‘Yes, if his death harms no other person and if life is ill for him.’

By late 1817 Napoleon was suffering from depression, as well as liver problems, stomach pains and perhaps hepatitis B. ‘The thoughts of the night are not gay,’ he told Bertrand.126 He nonetheless does not seem to have seriously considered committing suicide, despite having attempted it once at Fontainebleau in 1814 and possibly again at the Élysée the following year. The only indication that he might have thought about it on St Helena emerged second-hand over half a century after his death, in the 1877 memoirs of Albine de Nontholon’s lover Basil Jackson, who claimed that on St Helena Gourgaud ‘would … talk strangely, even going so far as to more than insinuate that Napoleon had suggested to him self-destruction; this was on an occasion when death by means of the fumes of charcoal were talked of.’127 (Grilled charcoal exudes carbon monoxide.) By 1818, it was true, he had written his memoirs; he was never going to see any of his family again; he complained of failing memory and libido; he was obviously ill and often in pain. He was also easily brave enough to kill himself, and his lack of religious faith meant that ‘I don’t have chimerical fears of Hell.’128 ‘Death is nothing but a sleep without dreams’, and ‘As to my body, it will become carrots or turnips. I have no dread of death. In the army I have seen many men perish who were talking to me.’

The news of Napoleon’s return reached Paris at noon on March 5 via the Chappe aerial telegraph, but the government kept it secret until the 7th.124 Ney, Macdonald and Saint-Cyr were deputed by Soult, the new war minister, to address the problem, whereupon Ney told Louis XVIII: ‘I will seize Bonaparte, I promise you, and I will bring him to you in an iron cage.’125 Soult’s order to the army stated that only traitors would join Napoleon, and ‘This man is now but an adventurer. His last mad act has revealed him for what he is.’126 And yet, for all this, the only two marshals to fight alongside Napoleon on the battlefield of Waterloo would be Ney and Soult.

In gross defiance of orders, many in the army openly celebrated Napoleon’s birthday on August 15, 1814, with cannon-fire salutes and cries of ‘Vive l’Empereur!’ as sentries presented arms only to officers wearing the Légion d’Honneur.