The 'most
written about'
man on Earth
There are more books on Napoleon than on any other individual, except Christ, who many believe was above it all.
Some of the works devoted to the little man in the funny hat run to half a dozen volumes and more. |
Romantics loved him in his youth |
Here then is a biography of him which – while attempting to be accurate and complete - is the shortest I can manage.
Actually it is a very brief summing up of the shortest book available on the subject, which is a brilliant exercise by historian Paul Johnson.
Napoleon (Phoenix Paperbacks, 2002) runs to just 193 pages, plus bibliography, indices etc.
The summary below runs to less than 5 pages.
Here are the facts:
His correct name is da Buonaparte, which he later used as Bonaparte. The name Napoleon (or Nabulion as it was finally registered) was an afterthought, not used even by Josephine, his first wife. “Boney” as contemporary Brits called him, would sign documents simply ‘Nap’ or np.He was born on 15 August 1769 on the island of Corsica.
This was the same year that Bonaparte’s nemesis, the Duke of Wellington was born. It was an era of much romantic culture, shared by people such as Wordsworth, Coleridge, Beethoven and Sir Walter Scott.
All of these admired the glowering five-foot-five 'Giant of Europe', with one tiny feminine hand hidden in his greatcoat. The literati admired him for the way he had cleared France of its bloody revolutionaries and created a stable society that brought order to most of the chaotic continent. But these contemporaries, and many others, denounced him later for his totalitarian methods.
Paul Johnson avers that Bonaparte is the grandest possible example of the reality that a single individual can alter history, and that economic and socio-political pressures are not the sole determinants of change, as most academics aver. Bonaparte exercised power for only 15 years, and in that time his personal decisions and actions changed Europe into a new geopolitical shape that lasted for 200 years. The direct consequences of his actions were huge, even when unintended – for in the end he hurt France and prompted Germany to unite, and Prussia to militarize, so that they dominated Europe from 1813 to 1945.
Bonaparte introduced to the world concepts such as official army conscription; total warfare; Secret Police run by the State; government propaganda and large-scale espionage. By 1802 he was First Consul of France and the supreme commander of all its forces. Then he became Emperor and achieved a brilliant military victory (in the same year in which his navy was smashed by Nelson’s small fleet at Trafalgar, 1805). On land, however, he took on the combined forces of Austria and Russia, led by their two emperors, and defeated both without even deploying his 50,000 elite Guards. That was at Austerlitz in 1805.
By 1809 all of Europe was at his feet.
How could an uneducated, unconnected Corsican kid achieve all this?
His strengths
In appropriating Italianate Corsica, France needed to offer its new citizens appropriate advantages for their loyalty. Through Corsican patronage, Bonaparte had the good fortune to be enrolled in a Parisian royal school at the age of nine (where he learned French) and at 16 emerged from a military academy to become an officer in an artillery regiment. His strengths were his unbounded ambition and his gift – not merely as a tactician, but as a geo-strategist bordering on genius.
Where fellow officers would merely guess at how long it would take to march an army 300km into battle, Bonaparte would study maps and intelligence, then work it out to the hour.
As a young man he boasted, “Europe is but a molehill. . we must go to the East, for glory lies there" He calculated that with 150 cannon, 30,000 French troops, 30,000 Egyptian mercenaries, and 50,000 captured camels he could cross Mesopotamia and be on the Indus within four months. He plotted every move, and every item down to the last round of ammunition and water container.
Soon he acquired permission to invade Egypt - on two conditions: go no further, and finance and raise the expedition yourself. He plundered the Swiss treasury, planned an invasion, and put together an army, a navy and a cavalcade of scientists, archeologists, painters and propagandists to witness the subjugation of ‘the Orient”. After eluding Nelson’s navy and landing in Egypt, he orchestrated the Battle of the Pyramids in 1798. His guns mowed down 10,000 Egyptian infantry and camel cavalry at a cost of only 29 of his own troops.
A legend was born. . . just as his luck temporarily went bad.
News came of Josephine’s infidelity, and the defeat of his navy by Nelson. And then Turkey turned on him.
He led an expedition overland to conquer Turkey, but was defeated there by Admiral Sidney Smith and Turkish troops. Leaving behind his army in Egypt, he returned to Paris – where his setbacks were overlooked and he was hailed for his ‘great cultural discoveries in Ancient Egypt’.
His portrait painters -"the conqueror on a white horse" - and his propaganda machine had done a great job.
However, he needed another victory. Taking his Reserve Army through the Alps, he surprised an Austrian force and narrowly beat it at Marengo (14 June 1800). Even more popular at home after this Italian campaign was Bonaparte’s pact with the Pope which allowed Catholics freedom again in France after its revolutionary oppression. Within two years Bonaparte was First Consul, and in 1804 he became Emperor and supreme commander of all France’s forces.
That’s how the kid from Corsica did it.
‘Not tonight Josephine’
“Napoleon’s sexual life remains a mystery, despite all that has been written about it,” says Paul Johnson. "He and Josephine (Bonaparte’s first wife and older than he,) were apart a great deal and, when together, not close”.
She appeared to have a number of lovers, despite being First Lady of the Republic and then Empress.
Bonaparte, when on campaign, ordered women like take-aways. They were delivered to his tent naked, then taken away promptly afterwards.
For sound political reasons he tried to take as his second wife a daughter of the Czar of Russia. But the Romanovs spurned him – something he never forgave – and he turned to the Hapsburgs, who welcomed the game of statecraft. Thus Marie-Louise, great niece of Marie Antoinette, became his bride. She was big, blonde, reluctant and slow. “Boney” was fast and furious in temper and sexual habit. Court gossip about the wedding night had it that Marie-Louise was surprised when she lost her virginity to this husband half her age, then, after some thought, she spoke: ‘Do it again!’.
His political life
Bonaparte’s political life was wanting. There was no doubt of his military genius, but his statecraft and his vision of government and nation-building was narrow. His greatest failure of imagination was to sell half of the current USA to Thomas Jefferson as the “Louisiana Purchase” – a pittance that would not buy a decent French chataeau today.
Yet Bonaparte had other talents which he employed with immense energy. A journalist and admirer wrote of him ‘Never did the Council [of State] adjourn without its members knowing more than the day before; if not through knowledge derived from him, at least through the researchers he obliged them to make. . . What characterised him most of all was the force, flexibility and constancy of his attention. He can work 18 hours at a stretch on one or on several subjects . . never lacking in inspiration.”
Bonaparte would bombard everyone with questions. When, after an all-day session with only one 15-minute break, his councillors ‘break down and sink under the burden’ Bonaparte ‘seems no more fatigued at the close of the session as when it began.’
Bonaparte boasted: ‘Various subjects and affairs are stowed away in my brain as in a chest of drawers. When I want to take up any business, I shut one drawer and open another. None of them ever gets mixed, and never does this incommode me or fatigue me. . . If I seem ready to face what comes, it is because I have thought the matter over a long time before undertaking it.’
He was known to have a good memory for names and faces – and ‘a prodigious one for facts and localities’. For instance, one of his aides said he dictated in advance of the Battle of Austerlitz the entire campaign. . .’Order of marches, their duration. . . various movements and the mistakes of the enemy, all this in rapid dictation, was foreseen beforehand and at a distance of 200 leagues. . . The battlefield, the victories, and even the very days on which we were to enter Munich and Vienna were then announced and written down as it all turned out.’
In the face of all these admiring accounts, historian Paul Johnson adds a sardonic note: “Bonaparte’s prodigies of mental effort are no more plausible than the witticisms of royalty are funny. . .Those who served Bonaparte most slavishly had most need, for their own self-respect, to present him as a colossus.”
Yet, as conqueror and dictator he was a colossus.
It was the sea - where the British navy and its ‘unfair, immoral’ blockade frustrated him - that helped cause his downfall. Thus, when Wellington confounded Bonaparte’s legions in Spain, the Emperor lost his temper and his sense of strategy, and he resorted to the tactics of tit-for-tat.
To answer the irritating Spanish resistance and the infuriating naval blockade, he would force Russia, as well as the rest of Europe, to co-operate in a boycott of Britain.
He felt it was time to stage another great ‘victoree’.
And so we come to Bonaparte’s first major decline.
To Russia, without love
It wasn’t the bitter cold and snows of Russia which defeated him. Not at first. The Emperor put together his greatest Grande Armee, conscripted across much of Europe and consisting of 650,000 soldiers. It’s cavalcade would take eight days to pass a single saluting base – and it had to live off the land it marched through.
It was mid-summer.
Half the army was lost on the forward march – not from frostbite and fatigue, but from the consequences of heat and hunger. The final retreat, starting in Moscow, involved his last 95,000 troops (50,000 others had been lost in Bonaparte’s pyrrhic victory 120kms short of Moscow, at Bordino on 7 September 1812).
Marshal Ney was left to organise an orderly retreat of the famous Napoleonic Guard, while Bonaparte himself nearly died in minus 25deg. weather as he rushed back in a convoy of three sleighs to explain ‘the atrocious catastophe’ brought about by ‘the unexpectedly early winter’.
Total war – and ruin
His enemies now sensed his vulnerability. Not only had he sacrificed his greatest armed force and his best officers, he had also lost 200,000 horses of his critically needed cavalry.
To quote Johnson:
“The outcome was the Battle of Leipzig, fought over three days, 16-19 October 1813. The number of troops involved was greater than in any of the pitched battles of the entire period 1792-1815. (Boridino was the next largest.) Bonaparte had 180,000 men around the city and was waiting 20,000 more. The Austrians, Prussians, Russians Swedes and other entitities had about 350,000 troops with more on the way. It was called ‘the battle of the nations’, a sombre phrase signifying what Bonaparte was doing to Europe, precipitating a new form of warfare that involved not just professional armies but entire peoples – total war. . . the environs [of Liepzig] became killing fields in which the casualties were not far short of 100,000 ”
Bonaparte left behind 30,000 prisoners, and 100,000 soldiers who had been manning forts all over occupied Germany. The French empire was in military ruins, and foreign troops entered French territory for the first time. The Parris mobs turned against Bonaparte and he was forced to abdicate. He was offered the petty kingdom of the isle of Elba, and was deposited there by the British Navy.
Tallyrand, with the help of Metternich and leaders of Britain, Prussia and Russia, restored the Bourbon reign in France with Louis XVIII, brother of the guillotined king). Bonaparte’s ‘King of Rome’ and all his family were deposed, while he was named ‘Emperor and Ruler of Elba’. . . It was Tallyrand’s sly little joke, offered in the name of peace in the interests of France.
But in February 1815, Bonaparte slipped out of Elba with 600 of his famous Guards, 100 Polish lancers and a million francs in gold. He arrived secretly in the south of France and soon won over the army contingents he had once commanded. His march on Paris was made with his old daring, dash and surprise, and he was right back in power in Paris without bloodshed. This time, however, for the first time, his disparate opponents moved at the same speed as he did. The Seventh (and final) Coalition of Europe declared him an outlaw, ordered his arrest, and prepared instantly for battle.
Waterloo and banishment
Bonaparte organised his army, and waited. He preferred to forego the advantage of quick action to avoid being ‘the aggressor’. Finally he marched north to meet the assembling armies of Europe. Wellington, though supreme commander of the alliance, was in charge of only a small army in the field consisting of 15,000 British veterans, reinforced by 15,000 dubious volunteers from a number of countries. But Wellington found the high ground and Blucher and his Prussian army were coming to his assistance as, on 18 June 1815, the Battle of Waterloo began.
It is one of the decisive battles of history, needing no description here. (Johnson’s book provides a lucid, non-technical summary of the millions of words written on the subject). One memory of Waterloo is worth recording. It is the cry "La Garde recule! "
The elite Old Guard, consisting of the tallest, best trained soldiers of France – made more formidable in their towering bearskin helmets – were falling back! It was the first time they had ever fled from battle. Many of them were among the 40,000 dead whom Bonaparte lost at Waterloo.
Bonaparte, who might have been shot on sight by the Prussians, escaped by coach then on horseback and was quickly yet politely transported by the British once again to an island – this time in the remote Atlantic. At St Helena he lived and grew old with his chosen entourage – and with a precautionary squad of British warships anchored about the island. He was buried in beautiful Rupert Valley on the island, wearing the uniform of the Old Guard and the famous grey coat he had worn at Marengo.
Paul Johnson concludes with a debate on the campaigns to immortalise the man, even before the British allowed him to be re-buried on the banks of the Seine in 1840.
His body lay in the military pantheon, while 20 years were spent in creating “the most sumptuous tomb-memorial since antiquity for the ‘glorification of the ‘greatest soldier who ever lived’.”
Johnson suggests that it might have been better for the world, including France, if the simple enterrement at St Helena had been left undisturbed.
“For as Bonaparte had died as a stricken and defeated man, Napoleon soon began to rise as an immortal myth, a victorious soldier, and a model ruler.”
The author - who demonstrates several times how inept Bonaparte was as an anti-democratic and selfish civil administrator - traces ‘the emergence of the Napoleon industry’. The propaganda was initiated after Bonaparte’s death - as it had been in his youth - by romantic writers including Victor Hugo and Thomas Carlyle. In his celebrated lectures of 1841, Heroes and Hero Worship, Carlyle brought Napoleon to centre stage ‘as a true democrat’; as did Emerson in America. Hardy, Belloc, Chesterton and Shaw all hailed Napoleaon as a saviour or superman.
In Germany, the most popular of lyric poets, Heine, advanced the myth of Napoleon as the great ruler, 'the Man on Horseback', and Napoleon’s admirer Hegel became the taproot for both Marxism and Nazism.
In France, the glorification of Napoleon was officially authorised under Napoleon III. Johnson writes: “The nostalgic urge to remember when the Napoleonic nation bestrode the world” caught fire. “The republic of Clemenceau, the Vichy dictatorship of Petain, the Fourth Republic of existentialist chaos, and the Fifth Republic of de Gaulle all genuflected at the tomb and venerated its occupant. . .No dictator of the tragic 20th century – from Lenin, Stalin and Mao Zedong, to pigmy tyrants like Kim II Sund, Castro, Peron, Mengistu, Saddam Hussein, Ceauescu and Gadhafi – was without distinctive echoes of the Napoleonic prototype.”
There are invigorating truths in this unromantic and sceptical view of a national hero, but they need not be taken too far. Bonaparte was no ideologue; no ‘nutter’ as some of the above were. His nature was very different to that of Stalin or Hitler or Mao.
A hard look at his record of governance, a more precise analysis of Napoleon and his deeds, including his atrocities in the Turkish campaign; his policy of instructing his occupying forces to ‘take from the land’ and the treatment or putting to death of prisoners, might earn him in today’s world a trial in a Human Rights Court.
* * *
This summary can provide only a sketch of biographical facts and a skeleton of analysis. You might wish to read Johnson’s book, reviewed here. Or get the other side of the picture from 28 thick volumes of Bonaparte’s correspondence, and the three volumes of his St Helena writings. Johnson suggests another 20 books on the subject. There are many hundreds more. . . |
