Great men change history, sometimes for better, sometimes for worse. But their legacy is always complicated, as Paul Johnson shows in his whirlwind biography Napoleon: A Life. Few could have predicted the Little Corporal’s ascent; within ten years, he rose from the obscurity of Corsica to become the most powerful man in France, probably in all Europe. Yet as he liberated the yearning nations of Europe from their ancient monarchies, he also ruthlessly expended the lives of his men in the pursuit of glory.
If there was a template to his life, it was that of Pasquale Paoli. Before Napoleon’s birth and during his youth, Paoli and his brigands led an insurrection from the hills of Corsica against their Genoese (and later French) overlords. They briefly established an independent republic with its own constitution and system of justice. It was a pattern Napoleon was to follow many times:
... the fate of Corisca enabled him to give a purpose to power. Winning a battle, a campaign, a war was not an end in itself but an opportunity to impose a new order on the old corrupt and inefficient systems. He was to be a Paoli for all Europe, but in an incomparably larger mould and operating on a continental, perhaps a world scale, for the better governance of mankind. (14)
Napoleon’s strengths were his decisiveness and his superb military tactics and strategy. Already as an artillery commander, he had an excellent grasp of the various figures and measures of war. From a glance at a map, he could determine where a unit could and should march to in a given time, and what would be needed to re-supply it. So reasoning about the moving parts of his armies, he could deploy and re-deploy them faster than any of his opponents, giving him the initiative in choosing when and where to fight.
He first distinguished himself with a series of victories against Austria in the Italian peninsula, but rose to fame when he dispersed a Parisian mob on October 5, 1795 with a “whiff of grapeshot.” He was rewarded with the supreme command of the Italian campaign and immediately set about re-organising the army. He established new workshops to produce armaments. He used the newly invented semaphore—a kind of telegraph by means of optical signals—to transmit military instructions over long distances. Exploiting new, lightweight cannon designs, he innovated on their use by dragging them into and out of battle as a source of mobile firepower.
The Italian campaign was vintage Bonaparte. He used rapid movements in risky, unpredictable attacks. Often he would divide the enemy armies and eliminate them one by one. To fund his efforts, he directed his men to loot churches and galleries. Weary from decades of war and instability, they were lured in by the promise of wealth. The top veterans later took cosy jobs in the constellation of republics Napoleon set up in the wake of his victories.
Though the campaign was a massive moral victory for France, the British never accepted it. Unable to match the Royal Navy’s supremacy on water, Napoleon instead drummed up support for an expedition to Egypt, funded with stolen Vatican and Swiss gold reserves. His goal was to establish a new passage to India. Through Egypt, he could cut the British out of the Indian trade, and perhaps collaborate with her enemies in Mysore.
Evading the British navy, he landed in Alexandria on July 2nd 1798 and defeated both the Mamelukes and the Ottomans. But almost his entire fleet was destroyed in a surprise raid by admiral Horatio Nelson. In the meantime, the home front was on the brink of collapse. This gave Napoleon the perfect excuse to abort the expedition, which he framed as an overall success, despite the fact he’d had to leave 10,000 soldiers behind in a hostile country.
Slipping back across the Mediterranean, Napoleon marched into Paris on a wave of public support. It was a dark hour for the country; only Napoleon, people thought, could save it. He dissolved the government by force and installed himself as First Consul of a new French Consulate, a military dictatorship with a pseudo-Roman veneer.
Taking the fight to the Austrians, he crossed the Alps and fell upon them “like a thunderbolt”. It was a risky move and a difficult crossing, but it paid off; the Austrians were caught off-guard and scrambled to respond. They suffered two fateful losses at Marengo and Hohenlinden; with Vienna exposed, they had to concede land in northern Italy. France also annexed territory up to the Rhine and established new Dutch and German client states.
Unlike other revolutionaries, Napoleon was careful not to wage war with the Church. He was less of an ideologue and more of a pragmatist or opportunist. He knew the importance of religion to the ordinary person and saw how it could be used to legitimise his rule. With a rigged plebiscite showing an overwhelming 99% support from the French people for crowning Napoleon emperor, there was only one thing to do.
Pope Pius VII was brought in for the job. But the ceremony was a farce from start to finish. The Pope was made to wait in a chilly room for several hours before he was finally allowed into Notre Dame. Then Napoleon’s wife, on the edge of a nervous breakdown, burst into tears. The Emperor-to-be, growing impatient, dumped the crown on his own head. His arrogance revealed his true intentions: Napoleon had no belief in his own God-given right to rule; the whole occasion was simply a way for him to entrench his own dynasty as the rulers of France.
His regime was a kind of despotism based on personal ambition and military strength. He had no political party, drawing support instead from the army and (so long as he defeated France’s enemies) the people. All the same, Napoleon ruthlessly expended the lives of his men in order to achieve his goals. One gets the impression he saw them as little more than human materiel, another column in a manifest of cannons, guns, and horses.
Napoleon’s military strategy and political authority reinforced each other. Being the Emperor, his presence on the battlefield inspired his men. Each victory cemented his right to rule. And unlike his opponents, who were officers drawn from various countries, having communication difficulties, political suspicions, and career rivals, there was no-one from above to dilute or meddle with his decisions; what Napoleon wanted, happened. He was able to spin losses as victories, frame setbacks as adjustments, and rally the whole French nation to his will.
At Austerlitz he dealt the coalition a killing blow. Outnumbered by a combined Russian-Austrian army, Napoleon feigned weakness so as to goad them into attacking him. They did, and were promptly ambushed by a contingent of troops that lay concealed in the mist. It was the end of the Austrian war effort. Emperor Francis II was forced to concede territories in Bavaria and Italy, as well as to recognise the establishment of a new confederation of Rhine German states.
Napoleon was an impatient person. In battle he liked to seize the initiative, which usually worked. But in politics, he was too eager to rip up the old states, forcing implausible new administrations and punitive taxes on his conquered subjects. Johnson sees a bit of carelessness in these actions. He links it to Napoleon’s initial struggle to produce an heir:
If Bonaparte had been married earlier, to a fertile woman, and produced children to succeed and assist him, who could be trained to rule, he would have looked at the empire as a long- term investment to be treated and coaxed and cherished accordingly. (76-7)
Unlike his sharpened battle instincts, Napoleon was not by nature a careful, prudent politician. Though often welcomed as an enlightened liberator, he merely replaced the old aristocracies with a new Francophile oligarchy, its members drawn from the families of accomplished marshals and generals, selected for loyalty rather than ability. The French Consulate had no real administrative hierarchy; there was, rather, a single man at the top, with a few hand-picked men holding ad-hoc portfolios beneath him. As with most authoritarian systems, Napoleonic France relied on its Emperor’s personal ability to muster enough force to defeat his enemies and awe and dragoon his subjects. It was fragile and unlikely to survive his death.
One of his lasting contributions was the consolidation of France’s laws into a single document called the Code Napoleon. The process had already begun during the French revolution, but the odd inconsistency and regionalism still persisted. The new law was draconian. Johnson outright describes it as totalitarian. However, the centralised state being in its infancy, what we think of as totalitarian rule—the constant presence and domination of the state’s interests in all spheres of life—was as yet technically impossible. It is wiser to simply call Napoleon’s regime authoritarian. Semantics aside, the law favoured public authority over individual rights; its remit to make decisions on behalf of the individual for the good of France was essentially unlimited.
Not all of Napoleon’s acts of statecraft were successful. Despite shattering his foes on the continent, he could not challenge the British on the high seas. His navy was destroyed at The Battle of Trafalgar and his ports were blockaded. Napoleon’s response was to impose his own embargo on the British; under a new customs union called the Continental System, no-one was to trade with those soggy islands. Though he pursued this idea with unusual vigour, it ultimately failed. Napoleon did not realise the cost of imposing an embargo: his navy was too weak to stop smugglers, and vast amounts of manpower were expended patrolling the highways.
France’s goal was to isolate Britain, who continued to support a popular uprising in Spain against the French occupation. Russia, meanwhile, refused to participate in the Continental System, prompting Napoleon to bring them into it by force. Both theatres—Spain and Russia—were to be his undoing. Napoleon had little understanding of either country, and could not conceptualise their logistic difficulties. His usual strategy was to capture bridges and cities, looting them for the supplies necessary to continue his fast-paced offensive campaigns. He would move to isolate and capture the enemy’s capital city and then force them to sue for peace. Yet in those cases:
[Russia and Spain] had untamed, often unbridged rivers, poor or nonexistent roads, subsistence economies that could not support unsupplied armies, and extremes of climate that made both summers and winters perilous for troops without barracks. (125-6)
His British counterpart, Arthur Wellesley, the Duke of Wellington, fought a superb campaign on the Iberian peninsula. Unlike Napoleon, Wellington was patient, content to let small gains accrue, rather than seeking to end the war in a few decisive battles.
Napoleon’s initial failure in Spain may have inspired him to go after Russia in 1812 with unusual energy; he certainly needed the propaganda victory at home. By making an example of Tsar Alexander, he would also bring a powerful ally into the Continental System and thereby embolden a new European order with France at its top.
The invading French army—up to that point the largest ever assembled in Europe—was so big it was unwieldy, a disaster in Russia’s unforgiving terrain and climate. Villages and cities were sparse, and not enough food could be pilfered to sustain the invasion. The two sides briefly clashed on September 7, but the Russians withdrew after one day, allowing the French to occupy Moscow. Napoleon expected to be able to dictate peace terms; Alexander simply ignored him.
Realising that winter would block his way out of Moscow, Napoleon started to withdraw his troops in October. Conditions were extremely harsh. Most of his horses were dead or eaten. The Russians picked off his men as they fled; cold and starvation did the rest. By the end of it, half a million of his soldiers had perished.
Yet Napoleon refused to settle with his enemies. He fled to Paris and raised a fresh round of recruits. But now he had to fight the combined states of Germany; having destroyed the sprawling, inefficient Holy Roman Empire, there was a political vacuum which a new nationalist spirit had filled. Though there was not to be a unified Germany for another 60 years, the German people were not at all happy with being subservient in a French-dominated Europe. A series of reforms had now turned the Prussian military into Europe’s finest. Joined by Austria, Russia, Sweden, Great Britain, Portugal, Sicily, Sardinia, and a coalition of smaller German nations, they defeated Napoleon and exiled him to Elba, a small island off the coast of Italy.
For anyone else, it would have been the end. As it turned out, this was merely a strange interlude in Napoleon’s staggering life. He spent nearly a year as Prince of Elba; the title was itself a humiliation for a man of his stature. He nonetheless busied himself with his tiny principality. Tourists making the rounds of Italy would come over on the ferry to gawk at the fallen Emperor.
This little island was clearly too small for his ambitions. A mixture of paranoia, boredom, ambition, and humiliation led Napoleon back to power in dramatic fashion in 1815. Landing with his personal retinue in southern France, he sneaked past the royalist army garrisoned at Marseilles, only to find the way blocked by an infantry garrison. The Prince of Elba simply bluffed it; he announced that he was once more Emperor of France, and took command of them. At Grenoble he was greeted as a returning ruler. Marshal Ney was sent out to capture Napoleon but ended up defecting to him. They entered Paris unopposed.
Wellington was summoned to head a new coalition. Together with the Prussians under General Blücher, they met the French in battle at Waterloo, Belgium. It was, as Wellington later recalled, “a close run thing.” Napoleon’s strategy was to seize the initiative and strike between the two armies before they could combine, eliminating one and then turning to fight off the other. On the morning of battle, he delayed his attack by several hours, believing the ground to be too wet. This gave Blücher all the more time to get to Wellington. Then a French delaying movement, led by Marshal Grouchy, failed to intercept the Prussians. He got so lost he could not join the main battle in time. All of this tipped the scales in favour of the Coalition.
A defeated Napoleon relinquished his command. The French war effort collapsed not long afterwards. The seventh and final coalition had done its job. This time, Napoleon was to be exiled to the remote island of St. Helena, a little rock in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. He would have lived out a reasonably comfortable existence, had paranoia not disposed him against his neighbours. He died in unusual circumstances in 1821, probably of stomach cancer, perhaps of poisoning (of which Napoleon lived in constant fear).
As soon as he died, Napoleon’s legacy was already being distorted by those around him. They exalted him as the saviour of France, as an enlightened warrior who brought liberty to the enslaved nations of Europe. Most of this was simply untrue, argues Johnson. Napoleon was a despot and a tyrant. He sacrificed his own men to obtain and hold onto power. He reintroduced slavery. He allowed his military victories to get to his head; eventually he identified his ambitions as one and the same as the destiny of France—perhaps as the destiny of all Europe. Most of his achievements, Johnson contends, were overrated: “It is curious indeed that Bonaparte, in his lifetime, quite failed to destroy legitimist Europe. In the end, he provoked the Congress of Vienna, which refounded legitmism so firmly that it lasted another century...” (192-3)
There is more than a little bit of venom in Johnson’s assessment: Napoleon’s republicanism was unimpressive, because the new state he founded was totalitarian and anyway inferior to the British system. The patriotic clubs he used to justify his made-up republics were sock-puppets. I do think Johnson underestimates the popular discontent of some of the regimes Napoleon smashed apart. In the Netherlands, for example, the House of Orange-Nassau had long banned the practice of Catholicism (the dominant faith in Brabant) and monopolised the various Stadhouder titles, turning theoretically elected positions into hereditary ones. The regime was genuinely unpopular. It had already been embroiled in several decades of civil strife, including uprisings of civilian militias. Other, more psychological judgements about Napoleon’s life are mere speculation, and thus unfair. One reads the description of Napoleon’s struggle to produce an heir in a mocking tone. And when all else fails, roll out the Hitler comparisons.
This book is an informed biography for the general audience. It lacks proper endnotes, unfortunately, but it remains a good, albeit sketchy introduction to Napoleon; though Johnson makes a good effort of it, 200 pages is simply not long enough. Even if Napoleon’s dream of a united Europe did not eventuate, even if he was, as Johnson persistently claims, a despot, his life is still a fascinating adventure to read about. Nobody could have predicted his rise from the backwaters of Corsica. Such lives seem in themselves to be refutations of the hard claim that history operates according to deterministic, predictable laws. Everything the Little Corporal obtained, he took with sabre and cannon: in the end, he fell by that same iron law to the relative indignity of the lonely rock of St. Helena.